Gerald Keddy Can Still Makes Amends

...after calling Nova Scotians "no good bastards" who won't work on his Xmas Tree Farm:

Bernie Smith of the Spring Garden Road Merchants Association says you can't lump every unemployed person into the category of no-good bastards. Smith has helped many of the street's panhandlers find jobs and says no Christmas tree grower has come to him to ask if anyone might be available for work. Smith says he could likely find several who'd take on the job.

You know what to do, Gerald.

Rumor: Father Of Speechy Warrior Has Property Vandalized

I am informed that when vandals hit the Calgary Jewish Community Center and the Congregation House of Jacob Mikveh Israel last week with Swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti, they also got the house of one Marvin Levant, father of Ezra Levant, Canada's premier Free Speech warrior and an opponent of legislation intended to crack down on Neo Nazi's on-line activity.

Can't confirm this 100%, but Levant the Elder does live quite close by.

Here's Marvin himself complaining about Human Rights Commissions.

Your Daily Nazi: Remember, They're Just Cuddly Free Speech Heroes

Aryan Guard Founder Kyle McKee Wanted For Attempted Murder

Kudos to ARC for being 24 hours in front of the MSM on this. Remember: repeal S.13, and these guys are the big winners.

CRU Hack: Who Is Hugh Miller?

He seems to be the guy behind Anelegantchaos, a page that allows you to search those hacked emails from CRU that allegedly reveal the great global warming conspiracy. Here's a bit from the whois on the site:

Domain ID:D108560062-LROR
Domain Name:ANELEGANTCHAOS.ORG
Created On:15-Nov-2005 17:47:05 UTC
Last Updated On:16-Nov-2009 01:26:16 UTC
Expiration Date:15-Nov-2010 17:47:05 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:1 & 1 Internet AG (R73-LROR)
[...]
Registrant Name:Hugh Miller


Its a real guy; at least the email (hmiller@cfpress.co.uk) matches the email of this web developer with Clyde & Forth Press.

On the other hand, Jeff points out that Hugh Miller is also the name of a Glacier.

How To Drive Those Liberal Numbers Even Lower

Blindly support even the dumbest Tory "tough on crime" bills:

...C-47, the other half of lawful access came up for second reading. This part of the bill is particularly problematic is it raises the prospect of mandatory disclosure of personal information without a warrant and requires ISPs to install new surveillance capabilities on their networks.

[...]

The Liberals adopted the "what took you so long" position, with MPs Dan McTeague and Andrew Kania pledging their support and asking why it took so long to bring the bill to the House.

In brief, the bill will allow police to demand that an IP hand over your personal information without a warrant. Furthermore,

...there is not even a requirement for the commission of a crime to justify access to personal information without a warrant.

Apparently the Libs were pushing a generally similar bill a few years back (a fact that will surely be brought up by proponents of the new law), but this one goes even further in that it adopts "an exceptionally broad definition of customer name and address information".

I would urge readers to take in all of the Geist article--contrast especially NDP MP Don Davies measured response to Conservative taunting over this bill (Its for the children! Why do you hate children?) with the Libs knee-jerk "metoo-ism".

Poor Libs. These days they fight when they should make a deal, and they run when they should fight. You'd think that Iggy and Co. would have figured out that appealing to Conservative voters hasn't worked, and that they are now in danger of losing a good portion of their own base. Maybe Ms. Krieber should save a place for me on the other side of the aisle.

Random Sunday Notes

1) Its November 22 and I'm wearing sandals. Thank you El Nino. Pity about all those droughts in Australia.

2) Longos has the best samples of any major grocery store. When my wife and I shop there on Sunday's we call it going out for lunch. You can usually get two or three helpings before they recognize you and start asking questions. Then you just switch to a fake foreign accent. For example:

Q: Have you ever been to Yale?
A: I have. I yust got out.

Today's special was Spanish Blue Cheese, in which they employ a totally different species of fungus from the lame Gorgonzola shit! Awesome!

3) Wimmun: you can't live with 'em, you can't kill 'em. Although who can really blame her? I do disagree with all the stuff about Dion being more competent. But yes indeed Iggy has sucked the past couple of months. No hiding the fact. But why trumpet it? Given the timing of the post, I wonder if alcohol wasn't involved. Don't get drunk and go Facebooking, crazy lady!

Warman Takes Aim

...at CanWest and Walker Morrow, after a story in a local paper went CanWest wide. You can read the details at Walker's place, but here's the apology Cowichan Valley Citizen eventually published:

On October 9th, 2009 the Cowichan Valley Citizen published a column titled "Questionable conduct of CHRC". In this column, it was alleged that investigations were begun, not only by the RCMP, but by the Privacy Commissioner as well, and a Parliamentary Review of the CHRC's activities was conducted.

In publishing the column it was not made clear that these statements referred to the CHRC and not Mr. Warman. Further, that the criminal investigation had concluded without charges being laid and that the Privacy Commissioner determined that no breach of the Privacy Act occurred and that the privacy complaint was "not well-founded".

The column also referred to a "conflict of interest" and"corruption". It was not the intent of the Cowichan Valley Citizen that these statements be regarded as factual or refer to Richard Warman. The Cowichan Valley Citizen has no evidence that Richard Warman was in a conflict of interest, corrupt or subject to a criminal investigation or an investigation by the Privacy Commission.

The Cowichan Valley Citizen hereby wholly and unreservedly apologizes to Mr. Warman and regrets any embarrassment this column may have caused Mr. Warman.

Given the howlers in the origonal article (which I won't link to), you have to think that the Citizen is publishing just anything that's put in front of them.

Tells you about the state of CanWest papers these days.

Speechies are offering moral support in the comments, but little in the way of cash for legal fees, and at the moment Walker seems intent on going down fighting in the name of Freedom.

MP Maurice Vellacott: Saskatoon Doctors Should Be Commended For Reducing The Availability of Abortion Services

“The bottom line is that the decline in the availability of abortion services is directly linked to a growing commitment to the medical evidence of what abortion does and how abortion negatively impacts the lives of women. Saskatoon’s doctors should be commended for the leadership they are showing by reducing the availability of abortion in our city...."

From a news release posted to his website last evening. I guess this begs the question: are Saskatoon Doctors inappropriately imposing their moral values on their patients? Both the original Star Phoenix article and Vellacott's congratulatory press release suggest that this is the case.

And another nice quote:

Pro-life feminists have also come to see abortion as part of a male agenda to have women more sexually available.

Just three points off a majority, folks.

The First In A Series?

Wildrose Alliance "strategist" Stephen Carter on Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach's Ukranian accent:

"Just saw da premier making a speech. Dat was quite a speech. Dem media better report it right."

...a tweet for which he has since apologized.

Ms. Smith can come off looking and sounding more or less normal, but when you get to the lower echelons, when The Wildrose Alliance start wheeling out nominees, they will, mark my words, have problems with teh crazy. Chandler and the separatists and the wall builders are still out there, waiting for their time to howwwl!

Liberal Propaganda...

...but true enough. Tim Hudak will complain about the HST, but should he win office, will do nothing to reverse it. The NDP own this issue, provincially and federally, as I've argued previously.

RealClimate On CRU Hack

...more particularly, on Phil Jones' "trick":

No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context. One example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.

CRU Hacked

...secret lives of climate scientists spilled! And they really are as boring as you thought!

The story so far: Russian hackers have recently broken into the computers at University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) and posted files containing private emails between any number of well-known climate researchers. The usual suspects are claiming that the emails show massive malfeasance! the scientific fraud of the millennium! a Marxist conspiracy! and so on and so forth. I have looked a some of the material (from a honking big 62 meg .zip file) but won't link to it here because it has been obtained illegally and I'm not quite sure what the legality of a link would be. From the random sample I've read (there are literally thousands of emails and hundreds of .doc and other files), you find climate scientists to-ing and fro-ing over various issues, being a bit bitchy, and saying mean things about folks like McIntyre. Very thin gruel for a massive conspiracy theory, just because there's so much good stuff they've missed. For example, there is no .txt file of the daily prayer to Gore the Fat, no emails re the meeting I personally arranged between prominent alarmists and the leaders of the Homo Sexual Agenda (now that was a weird night!), and none of the interminable discussions that have taken place concerning the difficulty these days of finding a virgin to sacrifice to Gaia.

Probably the worst bit, from an optics point of view (certainly its the thing being waved around by the denialist crowd) is a 10 year old email from Phil Jones:

From: Phil Jones
To: ray xbxxxey ,mann@[snipped], mxxes@[snipped]
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.bxxxfa@[snipped],t.xxxrn@[snipped]

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow. I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd [sic] from1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers, Phil

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit

The denialists are keying on the term "trick" and the phrase "to hide the decline". It turns out that in the email Jones is discussing methods of "splicing" (if thats the correct term) instrumental data to proxy records. He explains as follows:

"No, that’s completely wrong. In the sense that they’re talking about two different things here. They’re talking about the instrumental data which is unaltered – but they’re talking about proxy data going further back in time, a thousand years, and it’s just about how you add on the last few years, because when you get proxy data you sample things like tree rings and ice cores, and they don’t always have the last few years. So one way is to add on the instrumental data for the last few years."

Jones told TGIF he had no idea what me meant by using the words "hide the decline".

"That was an email from ten years ago. Can you remember the exact context of what you wrote ten years ago?"

So there you have it.

Your Daily Nazi: Tories And Nazis

Kinsella gives a half-dozen good reasons that the Harper Conservatives should eschew the "anti-Semitism" card. Here's another more recent one: Edmonton MP James Rajotte making all nicey with white nationalist Glenn Bahr.

Guy's Got A Point

Charlie Angus, after calling for a ban on twitter in the HOC, defends himself against the media blowback on Facebook:

Kady O’Malley calls me draconian. The National Post says I’m a luddite. It’s all over my comments that MP twitter posts lie between the banal and the inane. Have no fear national media — your ability to read what Carolyn Bennett eats for breakfast will not be shut down. I only wish I could have gotten this national uproar over the crisis being faced by children in Attawapiskat who are sleeping in tents tonight.

My two cents: I hate twitter but am enjoying the rank chaos it has engendered in the HOC.

Will B'nai Brith ReFeed Teh Crazy?

Well, they say they're going to.

Canadians welcome anti-radical Islam ad, B’nai Brith vows more to come

One hopes this is just butt-covering bluster designed to facilitate a retreat from this travesty of demagoguery and sub-standard graphic design. If BB does decide to run further inflammatory adverts, one can only hope they make them less like the kind of thing a teenage punk-band might produce with glue-sticks, scissors, and a cheap photocopier.

Talk to them about that, Harry Abrams.

The Ballad Of Dean del Mastro

...by the best band you've never heard of.

Toronto Sun Staff Exit The Propertied Class

...become renters. Will their coverage lurch left?

Looks like the sale of 333 King St. is nearing completion. Going forward, The Sun will lease back a portion of the building from its new owners. Six floors of newspaper will be crammed onto one. Staff will lose free parking, their cafeteria, and their printing presses. They are being advised to keep warm in winter by "running around in circles". They will be sharing the building with other commercial entities, including a laundromat and a paint-ball facility. No word on the purchaser, but the phrase "Sharia finance" comes up in the official sales docs on several occasions. Will traditional head-gear become a union issue when the next contract rolls around?

Your Daily Nazi: Aryan Guard Behind Calgary Vandalism?

ARC has some suggestive (though not conclusive) evidence that they might be. Meanwhile, stills from a video-tape of the incident have been released here.

Tory Stimulus Becomes Weirdly Self-Referential

Kinsella finds Canadian Action Plan signage announcing "installation of interior/exterior signage". So stimulus money is apparently being spent on erecting signs announcing the spending of stimulus money. How strange to be a Canadian, these days.