The Lasso of Truth

Cuttin' to the chase

As usual...

Pencils, pens... or even bleeding edge laptop computers... do not write lyrical poetry. Parachutes... even negligently packed... do not smash the life out of innocent, random people. Cars... even rip-snorting 400 horsepower street racers... do not chase down pedestrians like panicked bunnies... and guns... even the dark & dastardly Glock... do not foment murder.

So instead of trying to divert all the attention here to an inanimate object... be it a length of pipe, a snowplow, or yes... even a handgun... perhaps you could explain, how not discussing letting obviously mentally defective people with flagrantly violent ideation carom consequence-free throughout the larger field of folk is some sort of inconsequential side-issue.

Amen brother.

Oh Canada!

Not the least bit embarassed to be this pathetically stupid.

Eat it, losers...

 

UPDATE:  And after spending the last 5 hours listening to Canadian talk radio, I don't believe I have ever heard the word "faggot" used so many times -- ever, just in the telling of this story.  Mission accomplished guys!  It's nice to see there are still a few talking heads in this country with their balls intact.

Gaza stunt boat

Just another batch of agitators, itching for a fight and a photo-op to smear the Israelis with.

From my thoughts to his keyboard...

The Israelis should model their restraint on that shown by their opponents.

It looks to me as though they just might have, and good on them.  More and faster, please!

Tunnel Visionaries

The double-standard of left-wing "humanitarians"...

The Schalit family on Thursday asked for assistance from international left-wing activists due to arrive in the Gaza Strip later in the day.

If the left-wing activists pressure Hamas to allow international organizations to bring letters and food packages to Gilad Schalit, the kidnapped soldier's family has agreed to support the international expedition's attempt to dock, Army Radio reported Thursday.

Lawyer Nick Kaufman presented the offer to the organization "Free Gaza," one of the organizers of the flotilla headed for Gaza, which promptly refused the offer.

"We are disappointed that the organizers of the flotilla have refused to also provide basic humanitarian assistance to our son, who has been held in Gaza four years in contradiction of international law," said the Schalit family.

Apparently there are some people who "Free Gaza" are not interested in freeing.

Making the rest of them look bad

And where is Mr. Amnesty, now that we finally have an example of an immigrant who genuinely took the term "rehabilitation" to heart..?

The teenager, a gifted student, was pleading guilty to a string of muggings committed at 15 with an eclectic crew in Manhattan’s Chinatown. The judge, who remembered the pitfalls of Little Italy in the 1950s, urged him to use his sentence — three to nine years in a reformatory — as a chance to turn his life around.

“If you do that, I am here to stand behind you,” the judge, Michael A. Corriero, promised. The youth, Qing Hong Wu, vowed to change.

Mr. Wu kept his word. He was a model inmate, earning release after three years. He became the main support of his immigrant mother, studying and working his way up from data entry clerk to vice president for Internet technology at a national company.

But almost 15 years after his crimes, by applying for citizenship, Mr. Wu, 29, came to the attention of immigration authorities in a parallel law enforcement system that makes no allowances for rehabilitation. He was abruptly locked up in November as a “criminal alien,” subject to mandatory deportation to China — the nation he left at 5, when his family immigrated legally to the United States.

Now Judge Corriero, 67, retired from the bench, is trying to keep his side of the bargain.

It seems to me a few more of these would be a welcome change, in the long line of "humanitarian exceptions".  Which is also why I think it likely he will be deported post haste.

The very definition of insantiy

A stupendous failure gets another kick at the can...

President Hugo Chavez on Tuesday announced a new chain of government-run, cut-rate retail stores that will sell everything from food to cars to clothing from places such as China, Argentina and Bolivia.
"We're creating Comerso, meaning Socialist Corporation of Markets," Chavez said at the opening of a "socialist" fast-food location for traditional Venezuelan arepas (cornbread).

"They'll see what's good. We'll show them what a real market is all about, not those speculative, money-grubbing markets, but a market for the people," said Chavez in his drive to change Venezuela from a market-based economy to a socialist one.

Because it worked so great the last time.

Everybody's favorite villain

I often get into arguments with people I know when I hear them make some flippant remark, using "capitalism" like it's a bad word.  The attitude being that when a person acts in his own self interest, it's inherent that he will screw over everyone around him.

What a stupid and simplistic concept.

Whenever I point out that the simple act of coming to work each day, cashing their paycheque and wondering what to get the grandkids for Christmas, are all luxuries afforded by the avails of capitalism -- and that they are actively participating in it -- they insist either that it's not (?) or that they are the exception to the general rule of the corporate money-grubber caricature they have been groomed to revile.

What hubris it is, to think that only they may be virtuous and selfless, while working toward raises and bonuses, or seeking the best price for goods, but the rest of us -- those of us who actually admit to being capitalists -- are of the greedy sheister variety.  Yet, they are not confused by the contradiction...

As for Scrooge, how does this peculiar man — “solitary as an oyster” — represent an indictment of capitalism except for those who continue to embrace the nonsense notion that commercial society eradicates goodwill?

 

[..]

 

Would the world have been better without Scrooge? Did he force people to do business with him? Was Bob Cratchit not free to find better employment elsewhere? And if no such employment was available, was that Scrooge’s fault? Scrooge’s “conversion” is also problematic. Once Marley’s spectre has shown Scrooge what the afterlife looks like for the uncharitable, is there any need for the three Christmas ghosts? Scrooge has been “scared good” the old Christian way. With fear of eternal damnation.

Dickens’ portrait was in fact a caricature in his own time, when industrialists and businessmen were emerging as the greatest benefactors in history, but he wrote during an economic downturn that provided fertile ground for another much scarier horror story, The Communist Manifesto. Marx and Engels were concerned with the grime of Manchester rather than “The palpable brown air” of London, but their “plot” provided a blueprint for mass murder. And yet we still prefer to bash Scrooge, no matter how great the success of capitalism in lifting billions out of poverty and providing them with an increasingly stunning array of options. Indeed, does nobody notice the irony that capitalism has unleashed the consumerist cornucopia and charitable sentiments that were A Christmas Carol’s ideal?

As for the modern businesses, far from embracing Scrooge-ian attitudes, they positively slather themselves in the humbug of “corporate social responsibility. Indeed, the financial crisis was rooted not in the spirit of Scrooge but in the reverse: in the desire by strong-arming politicians to make sure that the Bob Cratchits of the world — particularly the ethnic minority Bob Cratchits (who, as opposed to in 1843, now have the vote) — be given loans they couldn’t afford so that they might achieve the dream of home ownership.

"Your paradise. Their prison."

I was 20 years old, driving home from some night club and passed a billboard shouting these words out from an idyllic beach scene.  Cuba was the subject, and at the time I knew and cared nothing about the political and social ramifications of what most Canadians consider as nothing more than a cheap vacation.

That billboard propelled me to learn enough to know better.

Sadly, most Canadians’ attitudes towards the world’s most accepted dictatorship haven’t changed...

In Raul's Cuba, as in Fidel's, dissent remains punishable by indefinite imprisonment, unemployment is considered antisocial and the government can lock away anyone a summary trial finds guilty of "dangerousness," a legal catch-all.

Once incarcerated, political prisoners are denied medical care, family visits and legal aid. Solitary confinement is a common and seemingly arbitrary form of discipline.

It's an old hobby horse of mine.  In light of Barack Obama's calls to lift sanctions on the island prison, it seems I'll be riding this one for years to come.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry

But it would seem as though I may have to rethink my fiery hatred for all things Whole Food...

Like many of his fellow health food fanatics, Joshua said he will no longer patronize the store after learning about Whole Foods Market Inc.'s CEO John Mackey's views on health care reform, which were made public this week in an op-ed piece he wrote for The Wall Street Journal.

[..]

The op-ed piece, which begins with a Margaret Thatcher quote, "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money," has left some Whole Foods loyalists enraged. Many say Mackey was out of line to opine against the liberal base that has made his fortune possible.

Christine Taylor, a 34-year-old New Jersey shopper, vowed never to step foot in another Whole Foods again.

"I will no longer be shopping at Whole Foods," Taylor told ABCNews.com. "I think a CEO should take care that if he speaks about politics, that his beliefs reflect at least the majority of his clients."

The entire op-ed can be read here and offers red meat for the individualist in a level of variety unheard-of on Whole Foods grocery shelves.  Including this unpleasant little truth...

At Whole Foods we allow our team members to vote on what benefits they most want the company to fund. Our Canadian and British employees express their benefit preferences very clearly—they want supplemental health-care dollars that they can control and spend themselves without permission from their governments. Why would they want such additional health-care benefit dollars if they already have an "intrinsic right to health care"? The answer is clear—no such right truly exists in either Canada or the U.K.—or in any other country.

Rather than increase government spending and control, we need to address the root causes of poor health. This begins with the realization that every American adult is responsible for his or her own health.

No wonder the lettuce eaters are pissed.  This may actually turn them back into carnivores.

Rewriting Webster

In the dictionary:

ol⋅i⋅gar⋅chy  

1. a form of government in which all power is vested in a few persons or in a dominant class or clique; government by the few.

2. a state or organization so ruled.

3. the persons or class so ruling.

In socialist Venezuela:

1. Buy your own damn food and medical treatments...if you can find them.

I paid $17,100 for private school...

...and all I got was this illiterate...

 

...communist...

Weep for the future.

h/t

Ever the scapegoat

When your "progressive" affirmative-action economics lead to catastrophic failure, just blame Reagan...

“This bill is the most important legislation for financial institutions in the last 50 years. It provides a long-term solution for troubled thrift institutions. ... All in all, I think we hit the jackpot.” So declared Ronald Reagan in 1982, as he signed the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act.

He was, as it happened, wrong about solving the problems of the thrifts. On the contrary, the bill turned the modest-sized troubles of savings-and-loan institutions into an utter catastrophe. But he was right about the legislation’s significance. And as for that jackpot — well, it finally came more than 25 years later, in the form of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

For the more one looks into the origins of the current disaster, the clearer it becomes that the key wrong turn — the turn that made crisis inevitable — took place in the early 1980s, during the Reagan years.

Teetering on the edge

When the most basic instinct of your very survival is on the line...

Do you really trust the same government that can’t oversee AIG, run a hurricane recovery effort, or balance its budget to decide which drugs, procedures, or operations are cost-effective for the American people?

The flaming stinkbomb, being foisted on the American public is universally known in Canada (where it is currently practiced in all it's socialized glory), by a term once coined by Mark Steyn: "equality of crap"...

What's the defining characteristic of a government health service? It's one word, a word that, in its medical context, doesn't exist south of the border--"waiting," as in "waiting list," "waiting times," waiting, waiting, waiting.

[..]

Hygiene is the number one issue in Canadian hospitals, and a problem with hygiene is the logical consequence of a system built on "waiting." On March 7 last year, Tse Chi Kwai went to Scarborough Grace Hospital and, as is traditional, was left on a gurney in emergency for 12 hours, exposed to hundreds of people. Two days earlier, his mother had died of SARS but, despite displaying to her doctor all the symptoms detailed in the several health alerts on the subject, had cause of death listed as "heart attack." And at Scarborough Grace, even after discovering that Tse's mother had recently died after returning from Hong Kong, Dr. Sandy Finkelstein concluded that, even if Tse was infectious, it was only with TB. Lying next to Tse on that ER gurney hour after hour was Joe Pollack, who was being treated for an irregular heartbeat. He was subsequently sent home but returned on March 16 with symptoms of SARS. He was admitted and isolated, but apparently it never occurred to the hospital to isolate Mrs. Pollack. So she wandered around the wards and infected an 82-year-old man from a Catholic Charismatic group.

Mr. Pollack, Mrs. Pollack, the 82-year-old Catholic Charismatic and his wife all died. None of these people went anywhere near Southeast Asia. They were exposed to SARS by the Toronto health care system, as was the 82-year-old's son, who was also unknowingly infected at Scarborough Grace and went on to expose another 500 to SARS at a religious retreat. As I wrote in the National Post at the time, "Only in Canada does the virus owe its grip on the population to the active co-operation of the medical profession. In Toronto, the system that's supposed to protect us from infection instead infected us. They breached the most basic medical principle: first do no harm."

h/t

Chicken Little journalism

And a stopped clock that hasn't been right in 45 years..?!

back in 1965, when Brown was a young bureaucrat in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, he declared, "the food problem emerging in the less-developing regions may be one of the most nearly insoluble problems facing man over the next few decades." In 1974, Brown maintained that farmers "can no longer keep up with rising demand; thus the outlook is for chronic scarcities and rising prices." In 1981, Brown stated that "global food insecurity is increasing," and further claimed that "the slim excess of growth in food production over population is narrowing." In 1989, Brown contended that "population growth is exceeding the farmer's ability to keep up," concluding that, "our oldest enemy, hunger, is again at the door." In 1995, Brown starkly warned, "Humanity's greatest challenge may soon be just making it to the next harvest." In 1997, Brown again proclaimed, "Food scarcity will be the defining issue of the new era now unfolding."

But this time it's different, right? After all, Brown claims that "when the 2008 harvest began, world carryover stocks of grain (the amount in the bin when the new harvest begins) were at 62 days of consumption, a near record low." But Brown has played this game before with world grain stocks. As the folks at the pro-life Population Research Institute (PRI) report, Brown claimed in 1974 that there were only 26 days of grain reserves left, but later he upped that number to 61 days. In 1976, reserves were supposed to have fallen to just 31 days, but again Brown raised that number in 1988 to 79 days. In 1980, only a 40-day supply was allegedly on hand, but a few years later he changed that estimate to 71 days. The PRI analysts noted that Brown has repeatedly issued differing figures for 1974: 26 or 27 days (1974); 33 days (1975); 40 days (1981); 43 days (1987); and 61 days (1988). In 2004, Brown claimed that the world's grain reserves had fallen to only 59 days of consumption, the lowest level in 30 years.

I used to read Scientific American, front to back, every month.  I haven't so much as glanced at the cover since Al Gore's eco-proselytizing became a feature, rather than a bug.

Murdering Incentive

Good question...

If raising the tax on cigarettes, alcohol and petrol is assumed to reduce smoking, drinking and driving, shouldn’t we consider the possibility that a 50% tax rate will also affect behaviour? And given the possible negative fallout of this 50% rate and the subsequent reduction of enterprise and tax revenue, it isn’t clear how all of this “social justice” will be paid for once the wealthy have been demoralised, exiled or taxed to buggery.

Don't be silly now.  Everybody knows that coercive redistribution of wealth never has negative consequences.

Das Kapital: The Musical

You think I'm joking.

For realism, they may want to consider including a score of music made from the wailing and moaning of abject misery...

A Chinese director is planning to stage a musical based on the founding text of communism, Karl Marx's Das Kapital.

The plot will revolve around a group of office employees who find out they are being exploited by their boss

There will be singing and dancing in this stage version of the classic communist treatise, which is due to open in Shanghai next year.

"We will bring [Marx's] economic theories to life in a trendy, interesting and educational play, which will be fun to watch,"

I've never been poor

...but I once made a movie about it!

From here...

To here...

To this...

It is often said that we live in the golden age of the documentary film. To the extent that this is true, the gold gleams brightest for the drama quotient of recent documentaries. The quality of their social analysis, for those that claim this to be their purpose, has generally been much dimmer. The latest contribution to the genre, The End of Poverty, from filmmaker and scriptwriter Philippe Diaz, is even dimmer than the norm. It devotes 106 minutes to the causes of poverty, but delivers neither drama nor good analysis. The core message is plain: The global South is poor because the developed countries made it that way and wish to keep it that way; free trade is bad and Western corporations are bad; the West is rich because the South is poor.

If I were to judge The End of Poverty as an Entertainment Weekly reviewer I could give it no more than a C-plus. The cinematography and production values are good: The costumes from Bolivia are colorful, the Brazilian accents are romantic and the media-trained talking heads have lovely artworks behind them. It all feels appropriately serious, if somewhat soporific. As a movie, however, it offers no suspense, plot twist or character development. It is didactic in a respectable, old-fashioned way, and that means the movie cannot justify itself as entertainment. It has none of the interesting self-subverting features of a movie like Mikhail Kalatozov’s 1964 I Am Cuba, an ostensible critique of capitalist exploitation that was banned from Cuba and the Soviet Union in part for making capitalism look too glamorous.

And so, in assessing The End of Poverty we must treat it as a true documentary, as an unfortunate captive audience might watch it in a high school class. That means we have to turn to the facts, and that is where the film gets not just dim, but downright ugly.

[..]

I can only report that The End of Poverty, narrated throughout by Martin Sheen, puts Ayn Rand back on the map as an accurate and indeed insightful cultural commentator. If you were to take the most overdone and most caricatured cocktail-party scenes from Atlas Shrugged, if you were to put the content of Rand’s “whiners” on the screen, mixed in with at least halfway competent production values, you would get something resembling The End of Poverty. If you ever thought that Rand’s nemeses were pure caricature, this film will show you that they are not.

RTWT

Where they line up out the door, to be oppressed...

In my experience, the elitist "experts" and "activists" who often pronounce on the plebeian matters which trouble us regular folk, more often than not have absolutely no idea what the hell they are talking about -- and no desire to learn and experience first hand, that which they can condemn from the information provided in a union leaflet...

The job was as dull as I expected, but I was stunned to discover how benign the workplace turned out to be. My supervisor was friendly, decent, and treated me as an equal. Wal-Mart allowed a liberal dress code. The company explained precisely what it expected from its employees, and adhered to this policy in every detail. I was unfailingly reminded to take paid rest breaks, and was also encouraged to take fully paid time, whenever I felt like it, to study topics such as job safety and customer relations via a series of well-produced interactive courses on computers in a room at the back of the store. Each successfully completed course added an increment to my hourly wage, a policy which Barbara Ehrenreich somehow forgot to mention in her book.

[..]

As for all those Wal-Mart horror stories—when I went home and checked the web sites that attack the company, I found that many of them are subsidized with union money. walmartwatch.com, for instance, is partnered with the Service Employees International Union; wakeupwalmart.com is copyright by United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. Why are unions so obsessed with Wal-Mart? I'm guessing that if the more-than-a-million Wal-Mart employees could be unionized, they would be compelled to contribute at least half a billion dollars per year in union dues.

h/t

Bill Ayers: Beloved Martyr

The quiet and unassuming terrorist conspirator (the new "Tookie"?), fresh from being turned away at the Canadian border, catches a brief glimpse of the other side of the "free speech" and "protest" coin...

18 year old student Taylor Balian is so open minded that her brain is falling out. She correctly rejects the people who disrupted the event, but she mistakenly thinks that entertaining the machinations of a terrorist/simple teacher can be anything other than a forensic examination of the mental illness of a red collar psychopath.

(Video at the link)

Vive la revolucion!

Benico del Toro channels a petulant, tantrum-wielding child when confronted by the grim reality that his romantic revolutionary hero was nothing more than a hate-filled, opportunistic, bloodthirsty murderer...

Guevara was instrumental in the creation of Cuba's forced labor camps, which were used to imprison and extract work from those who had committed no crimes but were thought to be insufficiently revolutionary.

The policy of extrajudicial imprisonment that Guevara favored would later expand to include political activists of all stripes, musicians, artists, homosexuals and others deemed to be dangerous to the maintenance of the Stalinist regime. (Librarians - WW.)

[..]

Critics of "Che" have suggested that the film whitewashes its protagonist's legacy and that it's impossible to understand the man by glorifying his more romantic aspects while ignoring his darker side.

"We can't cover it all," Mr. del Toro said. "You can make your own movie. You know? You can make your own movie. And let's see. Do the research."

Mr. Valladares is afraid that Mr. del Toro and Mr. Soderbergh's film will make people forget the reality that was Che Guevara's life.

"Benicio del Toro is just one of the many accomplices of the Cuban tyranny," he said. "All the murderers of people have had accomplices and people who made excuses for them. Stalin had them, Hitler had them, Pinochet had them, all the dictators have had apologists for them. Che Guevara and Fidel Castro also had them."

I guess that's the beauty of Hollywood, where everything has a do-over and life can be as good as the film editor cuts it -- you're not troubled by the grotesque details of reality and the most contemptible creatures catch the light of virtue, courtesy of selective willful ignorance and a key grip.

Our favorite revolutionary murderer

Via David Thompson, poignant words on a long-standing thorn in my side...

I wish that Mr. Soderbergh and Mr. Del Toro could live in Cuba, not as the pampered VIPs that they are when they visit today, but as Cubans do, with no United States Constitutional rights, with ration cards entitling them to tiny portions of provisions that the stores don’t even stock anyway, with chivatos surveilling them constantly. How long would it be before Mr. Soderbergh started sizing up inner tubes, speculating on the durability and buoyancy of them, asking himself, could I make the crossing on that? How long before Mr. Del Toro started gazing soulfully at divorced or widowed tourist women, hoping to seduce and marry one of them and get out? Only then could they see why this insipid, frivolous and pretentious movie they have made is nothing less than an insult to millions of people, who really do live like that, and who’ve lived like that their entire lives.

Maybe then, they could put their considerable talents into making a Cuba movie worth watching.
The world so needs to take off those dumb Che t-shirts, and grow up. We face serious problems, and totalitarianism isn’t a solution to any of them, even when it’s dressed up in a beret and given a wispy beard, flowing locks and a surly stare, and looks really, really cool.

Workers of the world UNITE!

And I thought unions were for pay equity and safe working conditions...

Ontario's largest university workers union is proposing a ban on Israeli academics teaching in the province's universities, in a move that echoes previous attempts to boycott goods and services from the Jewish state.

[..]

"In response to an appeal from the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees, we are ready to say Israeli academics should not be on our campuses unless they explicitly condemn the university bombing and the assault on Gaza in general," said Sid Ryan, president of CUPE Ontario.

And without a stitch of irony...

While Ms. Folk-Dawson (chairwoman of the university workers committee) said the resolution will protect the quality of education by preventing Israeli academics from professing biased views

DISGRACEFUL.  Shame. On. Them. All.

Where librarians go to jail for stocking Harry Potter...

Via Paul Tuns, this article on the spoiled rotten western teenager's favorite revolutionary accessory...

There have been some 16,000 such executions since the Castro brothers, Guevara and their merry men swept into Havana in January 1959. About 100,000 Cubans who have fallen foul of the regime have been jailed. Two million others have succeeded in escaping Castro's socialist paradise, while an estimated 30,000 have died in the attempt.

Which leads me to the nagging question that none of the Cuba-apologists I've met, have thus far been able to answer...if Communist/Socialist Cuba is the prosperous, happy-go-lucky paradise it is purported to be, why do so many thousands risk shark infested waters and death in order to leave it?

And I guess the Gulag was Club Med

Apparently for some of us, we never met a dictator we didn't love and admire...

Former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was beaten by medieval prince Alexander Nevsky in a poll held by a TV station to find the greatest Russian.

Stalin came third, despite being responsible for the deaths of millions of Soviets in labour camps and purges.

[..]

Stalin - born an ethnic Georgian - was riding high for many months and was in the number one slot at one point until the show's producer appealed to viewers to vote for someone else, says the BBC's Richard Galpin in Moscow.

Stalin sent millions of people to their deaths in the work camps of the Gulag. Millions more perished in political purges or during the forced collectivisation of farms during his rule from the 1920s to his death in 1953.

...and Mussolini kept the trains running on time.

If the Birkenstocks fit...

Like a pack of wild dogs, the socialists of America stick their snouts under Obama's tail and deem him not up to *ahem* snuff...

it's tough these days because you've got politicians on the right, the same guys who just helped nationalize the banking system, derisively and inaccurately calling the presidential candidate on the left a socialist. That's enough to make Karl Marx harumph in his grave.

Local communists, rarely tapped as campaign pundits, say Sen. Barack Obama and his policies stand far afield from any form of socialism they know.

John Bachtell, the Illinois organizer for Communist Party USA, sees attempts by Sen. John McCain's campaign to label Obama a socialist as both offensive to socialists and a desperate ploy to tap into fears of voters who haven't forgotten their Cold War rhetoric.

"Red baiting is really the last refuge of scoundrels," Bachtell said. "It has nothing to do with the issues that are confronting the American people right now. It's just a big diversion."

Of course that's just one man's opinion. (And everyone knows you can't trust a communist.)

It must be tough being a socialist these days, with over a century's worth of abject failure and misery being the primary accomplishment of your all-encompassing world view.

Obama may not be their kind of socialist.  But he is my kind of socialist...the kind that spends the day picking your pockets dry while admonishing you for not doing enough and then rewarding himself for being so selfless with your hard-earned money.

Because really...is there any other kind?

Strange bedfellows.

The Pinkos get an audience with the head of a state that hangs gay men in the street and still advocates the stoning of women...

The meeting, which took place in a cordial and positive atmosphere, was considered a great breakthrough.
“It’s rare for a head of state to take time during an official U.N. visit to meet with the peace community, especially in a situation where the host government—represented by the Bush administration—is so hostile,” said Evans, co-founder of CODEPINK. “The fact that the meeting took place and was so positive is, in itself, a major step forward.”

h/t

Where track marks become the new concentration camp stamp...

A drug addict is willing to live in a sewer and stick a filthy needle filled with a deadly poison, into their veins – running significant risk of suffocating in a pool of their own vomit, if not just slowly destroying any hope they have of leading a normal life – but the Health Ministry that has decided the beleaguered taxpayer should not be expected to subsidize and perpetuate this highly destructive practice, is engaging in “genocide”?

Crikey.  I though only smart people could graduate from medical school.

Welcome to socialized medicine

And the Utopian gloriousness of "universal health care"...

Health officials in Manitoba have launched an investigation into the death of a man who waited 34 hours for treatment in a Winnipeg emergency room.

The 45-year-old man was dropped off at the Health Sciences Centre in Winnipeg around 3 p.m. Friday, health officials have confirmed. He was found dead, still in the waiting area, just after midnight Sunday.

From "grim milestones" to "grim statistics"

The left and their military body count fetish...

The U.S. Army is nearing a grim statistic: The number of soldiers who committed suicide this year is on pace to be an all-time high. The record was set in 2007 when there were 115 suicides.

The Army says there have been 62 confirmed suicides by active duty members in 2008, with 31 unconfirmed cases that appear to be suicides.

The Army has responded with suicide prevention programs, but the trend has yet to be reversed.

To draw attention to the issue, Fort Drum, an Army base in upstate New York, hosted a march on Sept. 12 to remember victims of suicide.

If the media is so concerned about the self esteem of soldiers, maybe they should stop calling them baby killers and murderers.

And can somebody tell me the count on suicide bombers who kill themselves in the name of a deranged, murderous ideology?  Maybe they're not keeping track...

Or so Mayor Miller tells me...

The great city of Toronto would be an oasis of peaceful bliss and happiness, if we could only get a handgun ban.  I just know it.