The People Are Coming

...according to B.C. Liberal Leadership Candidate George Abbott's spectacularly ill-chosen campaign slogan, which reminds me of that guy who ran for leader of the Duma years ago, who promised that, if elected, everyone in Russia would have an orgasm. No word on how Mr. Abbott intends to deliver on his promises, but his campaign will almost certainly involve one of those province-wide bus-tours, so maybe he can go door-to-door.

JDL/EDL Love-In Update!

The day after EDL (English Defense League) leader Tommy Robinson aka Stephen Yaxley-Lennon addresses the Canadian branch of the Jewish Defense League (JDL), he'll be off to court for allegedly attacking another police officer! Meanwhile, two of his followers have just been convicted for murdering a guy back in the UK! Put the boots to him, inflicted over 40 different wounds upon him! The guy wasn't an Islamist, but he did have Aspergers, which almost half-rhymes with Islamist.

Meir Weinstein, leader of the Canadian chapter of the Jewish Defense League, you must be soooo proud.

T.O. Sun Now Housed Above A No-Frills

...with a paint-ball facility opening on the second floor, is the rumour I'm hearing (or trying to start).

PS. Looks like they're also getting a liquor store AND a Dollarama. All a journalist needs.

Your Daily Nazi: Jewish Defense League Gets Down With English Nazis

According to Shaidle's hubby, Meir Weinstein and Co. are staging a meet-and-greet (a "live Hookup") with EDL (English Defense League) leader Tommy Robinson on January 11th. Tommy's real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, and he is:

...a former[BNP] British National Party member who has served 12 months’ imprisonment for assaulting an off-duty police officer.

The BNP has been described as an "openly Neo-Nazi" party, and its founder John Tyndal once stated that "Mein Kampf is my bible". So: strange bedfellows indeed.

PS. It looks like Tommy's BNP roots recently got him booted from the EDL:

After Searchlight’s exposé of Yaxley-Lennon, the EDL held a series of emergency meetings and discussions, while Yaxley-Lennon went into hiding and his parents threatened to throw him out. The group has begun using Ulster loyalist language and imagery and attempting to forge relationships with people from one of the notorious football hooligan gangs in the province.

It is also in the midst of a bizarre internal dispute, with one faction lined up behind a convicted German nazi terrorist with a black wife and his friend, a disgraced former loyalist terrorist. Rudderless for almost three weeks, the EDL finally issued a statement on 12 July, acknowledging growing grievances and announcing a new structure of regional organisers. The statement concluded that “the English Defence League is ready to move on to the next step in our counter Jihad fight”.

PPS. I am assuming "live hookup" means done over skype or by video feed. I doubt Mr. Robinson has the kind of dough to spring for a plane ticket to Toronto. His criminal record might also make travel difficult.

And Then They Called It News Again

OTTAWA - The mystery of Peter Mansbridge's chair has been solved.

Thank you, Brian Lilley. From all of us. For doing that newsgathering thing you do, the way that only you can do.

On The Rebound Effect

The "rebound effect" postulates that, as energy efficiency goes up, the cost of using energy consuming products becomes less, which in turn leads us to consume more energy. So, for example, if your car gets better gas mileage, you will just drive it more.

But this argument is flawed in several respects. For example, in T.O (where I live) driving more means being stuck on the 404/401 longer, which tends to decrease the amount of pleasure associated with the whole experience.

In other words, driving is not like sex: you wouldn’t necessarily do more of it if you just had more energy.


Click through link above for scholarly discussion.

And They Called It News

OTTAWA - Questions about what ever happened to Peter Mansbridge's chair may never be answered.

Lilley's latest is up there with the T.O. Sun's front-page story from years ago about a suicidal raccoon. If the chair shows up dead in an alley-way, will they publish the gruesome crime scene pics?

What Is To Be Done With Justin Bieber?

The Tigerbeat interview with Justein Bieber in which he endorses the Ground Zero Mosque is a hoax. Nevertheless, it has inspired an anti-Bieber boycott which may, just by total accident, decrease the amount of shitty music on the planet.

How should a left-wing progressive react to this? How should we try to live?

My first thought is that Justin must be allowed to suck, otherwise the terrorists have already won. We must oppose this boycott even if the result is an continuation of the kind of crap music that today's youth seem to like, that often doesn't even contain even one electric guitar, but just alot of synths making bloopy bloopy noises. Later, if times call for it, we can take their rights away and make them get haircuts.

Not that I'm entirely anti-Youth. Below is a clip illustrating how you can be a teenager and not be too annoying:


I was never into these guys until I bought a $10 t-shirt off the remainder rack in a hippy place on Yonge St. Then I figured I'd better down-load some of their stuff just in case anyone asked about the shirt and, yeah, now I'm a fan.

On Astroturfing

For his film (Astro)Turf Wars, Taki Oldham secretly recorded a training session organized by a rightwing libertarian group called American Majority. The trainer, Austin James, was instructing Tea Party members on how to “manipulate the medium”. This is what he told them:

“Here’s what I do. I get on Amazon; I type in “Liberal Books”. I go through and I say “one star, one star, one star”. The flipside is you go to a conservative/ libertarian whatever, go to their products and give them five stars. … This is where your kids get information: Rotten Tomatoes, Flixster. These are places where you can rate movies. So when you type in “Movies on Healthcare”, I don’t want Michael Moore’s to come up, so I always give it bad ratings. I spend about 30 minutes a day, just click, click, click, click. … If there’s a place to comment, a place to rate, a place to share information, you have to do it. That’s how you control the online dialogue and give our ideas a fighting chance.”

LPoC Tentatively Offers To Show Some Spine

Although the article is entitled "Conservative Crime Agenda Moves Forward", this piece from Xtra offers progressives a glimmer of hope:

Liberal justice critic Marlene Jennings says she is open to killing the bill at second reading but says the Liberals are looking at how the bill fits with other Conservative crime legislation.

That's right, the LPoC is contemplating not rolling over on Bill S-10, which would mandate mandatory prison terms for whipping up a plate of hash brownies or growing a half-dozen (6) pot plants. I'm not sure the Harper Tories have given a name to this bill, but one good one might be the "Lets Bust Gramma Hippy Act" or, alternatively, "An Amendment To Imprison The Entire Population Of Saltspring Island".

In any case, I interpret Ms. Jennings words as a cry for help and guidance. If enough noise is aimed at the right people, this trivial but profoundly stupid bill may yet die.

Fox News North Owner Freeps Own Poll

MONTREAL - The CEO of Quebecor, Pierre Karl Peladeau is the person most prominent in the economic sphere in 2010, according to respondents to a Leger Marketing poll conducted on behalf of the Agency QMI.

Just to be clear: Peladeau owns Quebecor, and Quebecor owns QMI.

Go BC NDP!

Leadership hopeful Dana Larsen has the astounding ability to jam three dozen fatties in his mouth at one time. He can also roll 'em one handed...with his left hand! If the Dippers choose this guy, I don't know how they can be stopped.

Lest We Forget: Federal Taxes Going UP!

Virtually all workers in this country will take home less of their paycheque next year, according to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation’s latest calculations.
[...]

“Nearly every working Canadian will be paying more in income and payroll taxes in 2011,” said Derek Fildebrandt, CTF national research director.

Courtesy Stephen Harper and his CPoC gov.

By the way, I am including a shot of Derek Fildebrandt, who I have had the pleasure of debating on the Michael Coren show, because as far as I'm concerned he has world class hair. Up there with the hair of Gerard Kennedy and Pablo Rodriguez (but of the short spiky rather than long and ample variety). You can't really see it in the picture, but the tips of his hair are a different colour from the parts further back. Very sexxxy. I don't know how you get your hair that way. Its as though a man was crossed with some sexxxy wild beast.

Ah! If only I was younger and somewhat less straight.

On Piers Corbyn: Crazy People Occasionally Get Stuff Right By Accident

AGW denialist and "alternative" meteorologist Piers Corbyn has been much in the news lately, having allegedly forecast (but note Nicks comment in the comments) Europe's current spell of nasty weather. However, FreeD's Peter O'Donnell (another AGW denier and amateur meteorologist pursuing alternative research paradigms) explains the problem:

I can add some inside knowledge on this story -- don't get on this band-wagon because Piers Corbyn has been trying to fit every winter since about 2005 to this "coldest ever" scenario and we can't get any sort of testable information on methodology, even for those of us following alternative research methods, the answers have been too vague to allow any testing, and if we took all known forecasts from his company, the track record would be a lot less encouraging than this one forecast seems to be. Also, any number of other forecasts were saying this would be a severe winter in Europe, it was fairly obvious from the trends and the blocking pattern that caused the Russian fires, that the winter would probably be very cold.

[...]

Now that he's finally hit the jackpot with this coldest winter in living memory forecast, we need to ask, what's the track record going to be in the future, or do we now just get "another severe winter" forecast every year until that hits?

If you want to check out what I'm saying, you could google the names Piers Corbyn, Positive Weather Solutions, and January 2008 which gave a false positive for cold that caused these names to link up with newspaper headlines about a very cold winter to come...

And, as it turned out, I wrote about Corbyn's 2008 performance back in March of that year. He bunged up so badly that any number of other of his fellow AGW Deniers denounced him on the movement's well known Climate Sceptic mailing list. For example, Dutch denier Arthur Rorsch complained:

My problem is, however, that Piers forecasts, which where not sufficient accurate, has been used against me in the national (Dutch) debate on climate change. I did never refer to Piers. But it was assumed that I support his view, (as a sceptic) which weakened my own case, because the Piers forecasts where seriously questioned and he has not as yet been prepared to show the basis for his forecasts.

And Hans Erren groused:

Piers missed today's severe gale. Combined with the absence of a forecast cold winter in holland I think there is not much confidence left....

Its funny that Corbyn should be getting so much play in the MSM when even his own tribe has raised questions about his methodology.

Incidentally, Climate Scientist and general badass James Annan has made a cottage industry of debunking Corbyn. He hasn't written much lately on the topic, but here's some of his older stuff.

And, also incidentally, under his real name Peter O'Donnell is one of the anonymous posters from FreeD that Richard Warman has launched defamation suits against. Warman is not only fighting Hate, he's out there saving mother Gaia.

PS. I note that Stoat has written on Corbyn recently, though in a somewhat scrambly fashion.

Jaws: the Denialist Version

Synopsis

A group of so-called government funded "experts" whip up alarmist fears of a killer shark off the coast of Amity, a sea side town. Their goal is to destroy the local tourist industry, send Amity back to the dark ages and thus achieve their underlying socialist agenda of wealth redistribution. The heroes of this tale are the local major and business leaders who lead a successful audit of the alarmist claims and by doing so manage to delay action long enough that the beach remains open. In the end it turns out a shark has been eating people.

Funny stuff. The comments are good too.

Hudak Tories Fear Tory Turmoil In Hillier Vs. Sterling Dust Up

Anonymous Sources? The Tories got 'em too!

Several Tory MPPs have privately expressed shock over the letter [written by Tory MP Scott Reid bitching about Tory MPP Norm Sterling]. And one senior Liberal said the party will use Reid's remarks against Sterling in the October 2011 provincial election.

Hell ya! Kinsella's down in the lab testing out Adverts now! He don't care that its Xmas.

While some have compared the anti-Sterling movement to a Tea-Party-like push, others have doubts.

"That's some weak tea," said one senior Tory, who cast aspersions on the power of Hillier's former group, the Landowners' to convert their populist message into real political muscle.

Actually, the senior Tory is probably right. Looks like Hillier's landowner insurgency hasn't had much success to date.

About Time Too

It's like we've wasted a whole day.

h/t

Santa Flames Out!

...somewhere over India, apparently. He must have already finished-up in N.A. because I got all my stuff.

Have a Merry Xmas, because you probably will anyway despite my best efforts. Unless you're in India and the rest of Asia, in which case try and think of The Grinch That Stole Xmas where the Who's wound up with diddly and eased their pain by singing. Singing always helps when you get screwed.

Watched that old cartoon last night, incidentally. Its great until the last few minutes when the Grinch wusses out. And aren't dogs wonderfully loyal creatures?

The Pre-History Of Xmas: In Which Santa Flees Turkey With A Gang Of Midgets

(Note: this is a shameless rehash of something I wrote way back in 2006. However, I think its just as relevant today.)

Saint Nicholas, the inspiration for Santa Claus, was known for his fascination with children and prostitutes. In the "official" stories, these interests are described as being entirely innocent. For example, from The Lifesite:

"Legend has it that Saint Nicholas became aware of a desperately poor parishioner having three daughters with no dowry to recommend them for marriage. The father had planned to sell them into prostitution to provide some means of support. By night, Saint Nicholas secretly brought bags of gold on three separate occasions to the man's home. These generous visitations allowed the three daughters to have sufficient means to avoid whoredom and later strike a marriage covenant. On the third visit to deliver the gift, Nicholas was caught in the act of generosity by the grateful father."

But I once met a guy high up in Jesuit Order who knew the whole secret history of The Church, and he explained to me that this account was a total white-wash. If the truth had come out, Nicholas could have never been made a Saint. The real story is that for two nights Mr. Nicholas snuck in through a handy window to consort with these three vice girls, but on the third night he slipped on roof tiles and fell into some hedges, thus waking their old man!

And of course the girls' father was grateful! He got three bags of gold out of the deal. They were his payoff, his hush money!

In fact, father and daughters were in cahoots. The aforementioned marriage covenant was struck with Saint Nicholas himself, because daddy threatened to squeal him out in public. So Nick wound up living with with the gals Mormon-style, and in folk-tales they became known as The Brides Of Santa.

Nick was content with his lot, for the Brides bore him a whole gang of dwarf children, seven or eight of them in fact, including Grumpy, Smarmy, Sweaty, and Sleazy. But people got wind of their arrangement, and they fled Turkey with a torch-wielding mob on their ass. Eventually the whole motley crue landed up at the North Pole, which was pretty much parts unknown back in those days, and in any case ruled over by the loose living Swedes, who could be counted upon to look the other way with regards to the behavior of this rich bigamist and his midget clan.

Just to be safe, however, St. Nicholas grew a white beard, packed on a few pounds, and started calling himself "Santa". He made his kids shave, floss, and dress a little better, and started referring to them as "elves", which is the Viking word for "little white guy", in an attempt to compensate for their rather swarthy complexion.

So now you know.

Don't have any joy this Xmas. Remember, there's kids starving in Malaysia.

Feel Free To Speculate

...because I have no idea.

h/t