Jay Currie

Apparently the average upper income British Columbian generates 12 tonnes of CO2 per year.

As neither Susan nor I drive and our kids being 9 and 6 don’t either let’s call our evil, bad, noxious plant feeding something on the order of 40 tonnes per year.

The current Chicago price per tonne for CO2 is $.05 USD.

Er, 40x.05….$2.00 per year to fully offset.

Which suggests that there really is no need to bother.

But, for $50.00 I could offset the next 25 years.

I love markets.

The Islamic militant Hamas is claiming responsibility for a shooting attack that killed four Israelis in the West Bank.

Hamas military wing spokesman Abu Obeida told The Associated Press late Tuesday that Hamas carried out the attack near the West Bank city of Hebron. ap

Could Hamas be any more obvious?

Were I Israel I would politely excuse myself from the Washington talks for twenty minutes and bomb a Hamas HQ to rubble. I would then return to the talks and carry on.

CSE spokesman Adrian Simpson said Monday that the agency only spies on the electronic communication of foreign targets — non-Canadians living outside of Canada. He said that the only way the agency would be able to pick up the communications of a Canadian is if that foreign entity corresponded with a Canadian. montreal gazette

Right. And likely true. But the statement entirely ignores the intelligence sharing arrangements we have with our allies. Echelon springs to mind.

I happen to think that a vigorous signals intelligence operation should be directed at assorted jihadis in Canada. And it is pretty clear one is. Thank goodness. But it is pretty lame to pretend that our spies only read foreign directed material. (And if it is the case then they should be directed and empowered to look at the domestic chatter.)

Hmmmm

Kayhan, an Iranian newspaper, which is under control of the government, called Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy and Isabelle Adjani, the French actress who is campaigning for Ashtina’s release, “prostitutes” in an editorial, while Iranian state television accused the former supermodel of “immorality”. telegraph

If you happen to note that there is a nation which is proposing to stone a woman to death your past is going to be raked up. And Carla, realistically, will not be winning any awards from the Society for the Promotion of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice. These people are despicable pigs and going after Carla just proves the point.

One more reason to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities and initiate “regime change” forthwith.

“The CIC affirms that Canadian Muslims, more than other citizens, are deeply concerned and disturbed about the arrests and especially about psychological, social and emotional impact of these arrests on the well being of Canadian Muslims.” Canadian Islamic Congress press release

As well they should be.

You would think these people would have learned their lesson with the Toronto 18. Canadians support the security and police establishments when they have the gumption to actually go after terrorists. Are the Ottawa/Montreal people terrorists? We don’t know and the Courts have not weighed the evidence.

However, they are most certainly Muslims and, as Blazing and SquareMile Wife have been piecing together, some appear to have been creating rather doubtful charities suspected of funneling money to terrorists.

So, yes, CIC, Muslims have every reason to assume that their fellow Canadians will be suspicious and wary of them. If even a small minority of your community participate in terrorism or the financing of terrorism your entire community will feel the effects? Fair? Nope. But that is a very human response.

If you don’t like it you may be more comfortable in more Muslim friendly places.

Update: Kaffir Kanuck spells it out. And Dr. Dawg sticks his thumbs in his ears and chants “La, la, la…I can’t hear you.”

Up to you to figure our who makes more sense.

I’ve been studying this research for the past three years, in the course of writing my new book The Shallows: How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember. But my interest in the subject is not just academic. It’s personal. I was inspired to write the book after I realised that I was losing my own capacity for concentration and contemplation. Even when I was away from my computer, my mind seemed hungry for constant stimulation, for quick hits of information. I felt perpetually distracted.

Could my loss of focus be a result of all the time I’ve spent online? In search of an answer to that question, I began to dig into the many psychological, behavioural, and neurological studies that examine how the tools we use to think with — our information technologies — shape our habits of mind. the telegraph

I spend a good deal of my day in front of a computer and the internet is always there. Dawg barks, Watts Up With That points to another Climate Alarmist lunacy, Blazing Catfur connects more jihadi dots. Pretty girls continue to wear very few clothes. Stocks rise and fall and Garth Turner watches the collapse of the Canadian real estate market. 50 to 100 emails a day. G-mail instant messages, Campfire and Basecamp….Oh, and blogging, did I mention blogging. Craigslist, my sweetie finding beauty on E-bay…The Globe and Mail remains clueless and the Star treasonous.

At a glance, the sheer flow of information is overwhelming. And it may well be rewiring my brain. But on second glance my dog needs a walk, lunch is in the dining room, Max needs to beat me at soccer (and the little bugger is no longer getting a 50 foot wide goal, I have a diary to write and notes to make at my local (where all the servers are pretty and named Sara(h)), there is a delicious dinner to eat, the dog needs more walking. When I am on the phone I wander around my yard if it is not raining. There is the cocktail hour and the happy moment where I pick up Waugh’s Diaries or Martin Amis’ Essays which are entirely hyperlink free.

If anything, I suspect that my eight hours a day of net and computer use is simply a compartment of my larger brain. No doubt that compartment is wired in very odd ways; but it lives under the control of a set of pleasures and understandings which are purely real, or, at worst, analog. My boys can kick my butt at Wii; but even aged as I am, stealth and guile will win on the soccer field or the tennis courts for a few more years. And did I mention gamesmanship? I have yet to actually say to Max, “Look, an eagle.” shortly before curving it like Beckingham and knocking another slat out of the fence which is his goal. But I suspect it will come to that in short order. (Six becomes seven very quickly.)

No doubt if your entire life is digitally mediated your brain will turn to a sort of digital goo. (You can see visions of this speaking on the phone to someone who is casually surfing the net on the other end.) But if you manage some sort of balance and simply walk away from the machine for an hour or two at a time, the damage is wonderfully self repairing.

Vast solar system found 127 light years away
A vast solar system of seven planets orbiting a sun-like star has been discovered 127 light years from Earth. telegraph

An arrest has been made in connection with the murder of a Quebec woman in London more than a decade ago.

The body of Chomedey, Que., resident Fatima Kama, 28, was found at London’s Heathrow Airport in July 1999. Her body was stuffed in a suitcase and left on a luggage rack in a parking lot. vancouver sun

Drugs? Well a puff on a joint versus five years of party drugs (and which aren’t)...Ford kills Smitherman DUI included. Immigrants? Toronto doesn’t like being overwhelmed any more than the rest of the country and wonders who decided on this goofy policy. Polls?

The latest poll indicates Ford has the support of 32 per cent of decided voters, while Smitherman has 21 per cent. cbc

First of the wakeup calls for the “political class”. No one is believing you any more. Immigration sucks. Spending money you don’t have sucks. Global warming is expensive bullshit.

Your time is done.

Ford, win or lose, embodies the revolt of the peasants.

Were I Harper I would be very afraid.

Thousands of vehicles were bogged down Monday in a more than 100-kilometre (62-mile) traffic jam leading to Beijing that has lasted nine days and highlights China’s growing road congestion woes.

The Beijing-Tibet expressway slowed to a crawl on August 14 due to a spike in traffic by cargo-bearing heavy trucks heading to the capital, and compounded by road maintenance work that began five days later, the Global Times said. yahoovia peter grandich

I really like my walk downstairs commute.

There has been widespread opposition to the move to Salford, close to Manchester city centre, which is intended to make the Corporation less “London-centric” but is to cost around £877million over the next 20 years.

Large chunks of its operation will be moved north, including those responsible for children’s television, Radio 5 Live and BBC Breakfast. the telegraph

Of course the media drones are whining about the move. Of course.

But imagine the whine if Toronto’s Canada’s own CBC was sensibly relocated to Flin Flon.

Realistically there is no reason in this age of digital communication for the CBC to be isolated from the rest of Canada by having to operate from Toronto. So the Mothership should follow Big Sister’s lead and get out into the rest of the country.

No party reached an absolute majority in the Australian election held Saturday. Labor lost (approximately) 15 seats.

There is certainly a chance that Abbott could cobble together a working majority, so could Labor’s Gillard. The question is who would want to? Governing Australia with a paper thin majority means that neither party could really hope to achieve much programatically. But which ever party held power would have to deal with the assorted challenges facing Oz. These include a serious boat people problem, an inflated housing market and a faltering national economy. As well, as the increased popular vote for the Greens suggests, while the vast majority of Australians have seen through the climate change hoax, a vociferous minority will continue to attempt to force “action”.

The pendulum is swinging but it has not swung far enough. Tony Abbott might be well advised to let Gillard limp along for another year or two until the utter poverty of the left’s agenda for Australia becomes even more clearly defined.

Guisewite makes no apologies.

“I don’t know, as women, what we are past?’’ she asks. “When I write about dieting, I feel like I am writing as truthfully to women’s pressures and concerns today as I was as 34 years ago. The daily battle with self-image, self-consciousness and will power is exactly the same to me.’’ antonia zerbisias

The Zerb notes that many modern feminists do not lament the passing of “Cathy”. Nor do I. While I have no doubt that “Cathy” reflected the feminist struggles of the day, she was an annoyingly self obsessed little git. She is a reminder to me of all the women of my generation who did not have the gumption to have children, to take a stand, to love fully and deeply. We are missing half a generation because “Cathy” brilliantly suggested that while the geek boyfriend was not actually good enough she was too insecure to find one who was.

“Cathy” was often funny in a wimpy sort of way. She longed for a man, she always got a boy. And she got that boy because she was obsessed about her self image, her fat, her career.

In the end she’s screwed. Obsessing with the geek about how many pics they are taking and how to get rid of the in-laws to have a baby.

The futility of the feminist enterprise is, eventually, revealed in “Cathy”. Which is sad. But self-obsession will do that for a girl.

The main conclusion of the exhaustive 400-page report is that police likely should have caught Pickton years earlier and prevented the deaths of more than a dozen women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

“I owe it to the families and the public to be open and forthright,” LePard told a news conference that aired live on national TV. “They will likely find the contents of this report to be shocking and sad.

“But I hope that they will find some consolation in the fact the lessons we have learned leave us much better equipped to safeguard the vulnerable.”

Vancouver police chief Jim Chu acknowledged that the leak of an uncensored draft of the report to the Times Colonist on Thursday had hastened the report’s official release. Chu said his department will investigate how the leak occurred. times colonist

And about three years too late but, hey, it was before the Courts.

The interesting question which I suspect the Public Inquiry will dodge is whether Robert Pickton acted alone. It was a defence theory that Pickton, to put none to fine a point on it, was pretty much a moron and unlikely to have managed the slaughter without help and encouragement of others.

A judge has ordered anti-hate lawyer Richard Warman to turn over a laptop computer he used to create false personas on far-right websites, so that an independent expert can search it for evidence that Mr. Warman authored a racist comment against a Canadian senator.

In a ruling stemming from Mr. Warman’s libel suit against free-speech activist Ezra Levant, Master Donald E. Short of the Ontario Superior Court ordered that a “mirror image” of the computer’s hard drive be searched for any data about the names “Pogue Mahone,” “Axetogrind,” “Lucie,” “Mary Dufford” and “Dave McLean,” names Mr. Warman gave when registering with controversial websites to monitor online racism and prepare complaints of hate speech.

“Lucie” refers to Lucie Aubrac, a hero of the French Resistance. Pogue Mahone means “kiss my arse” in Gaelic.

The computer must also be searched for a list of words taken from the racist comment, posted on Freedomsite.org in 2003 by a person identified as 90sAREover. national post

Having read the decision there is little question that Ezra has won a significant victory. He did not get all he wanted but he can look at the hard drive and determine what Richard Warman was up to in respect of the Cools post and in respect to the various aliases Warman used. That, in itself, is huge.

What is, I suspect, bigger, is that the independent examiner will also be able to search through the meta- data and machine records to determine:

1. What, if anything, was erased
2. The usage of the computer
3. The assorted questions going to IPs

My own sense is that what may be interesting is “the dog which did not bark”. And that seemed to be the Master’s sense as well.

In my house, at the moment, we have seven devices capable of posting to the internet – though my flip phone would be really, really slow. Mr. Warman specialized in looking for so called “hate crime” on the net. Is it realistic to think a) he only used his laptop, b) that he had no access to other computers?

Now, only Mr. Warman knows what was on his laptop – and what was erased and how thoroughly it was erased. It will be interesting to see if he appeals.

There is an interesting and very tight election going on in Australia tomorrow.

Fresh from stabbing global warming nutbar and Oz PM Kevin Rudd in the kidneys and leaving him to bleed out, current Oz PM Julia Gillard is running even with Tony Abbott, the leader of a rightish Coalition. Rudd died on the barricades of climate change. Julia Gillard waffles hard. Abbott is swinging round to a realist position and is certainly not going to bring in cap and trade nonsense.

For results and commentary you’ll do no better than Tim Blair and Anthony Bolt.

It is an important election and with the preferential ballot should be entertaining all weekend.

Yes these are the Dog Days of summer. There’s not much to do and sniping is always entertaining. However there is a difference between sniping a simply whacking away with a sledge hammer. More than a few of my commentors have been simply rude rather than witty these last few days.

So, listen up: if you have a point, make it. If you want to slag someone…don’t. If you do you will be joining my six year old in “time out” land. And, just so we’re clear: if you get a time out you’ll be cut off from commenting for a while.

Smarten up.

The controversy began Tuesday night at a mayoral debate televised by CP24. A Tamil member of the audience asked the candidates to comment on the role of refugees in the city.

Ford responded: “We can’t even deal with the 2.5 million people in the city. I think it’s more important that we take care of the people now before we start bringing in more.”

Ford — who in 2003 said there should be a “refugee freeze” in Toronto —went on to say that the official city plan indicates a million people will be coming to the city over the next decade. toronto star

If Ford sticks to his guns on the immigration issue he will achieve two things; first, he will confront the reality that many Canadians are increasingly uncomfortable with what they see as an immigration and refugee policy which has lost touch with Canada’s needs, second, while he may drop a few points in his run for Mayor of Toronto, he’ll gain tremendous support across Canada.

The numbers are showing that Canadians are fed up with the namby pamby “Welcome Mat” policies of the Canadian government. More numbers are likely to show a greater disaffection with the status quo. Ford seems to get that even as the political class grows further out of touch.

Commenting will be closed on all stories at 6 p.m. on Aug. 17 at thestar.com. We apologize for any inconvenience. toronto star

Is this forever? Or just for tonight while the Star mods take a well deserved rest?

My hunch is forever simply because the Star keeps having its lefty ass handed to it in the comments. But let’s check in tomorrow to see if the wussies turn comments back on.

My libertarian friend Peter Jaworski of the Western Standard just brought this story to my attention—perhaps the most direct confirmation of anti-statist libertarian fears that one could imagine. This is a case of malicious meddling by petty Ontario officialdom that beggars belief. dr. dawg

Put up a Liberty Camp see the municipality try to ding you for 50K.

I am not sure whether to be outraged or simply roll on the floor laughing at the utter imbecility of the officials involved. Either way, unless I hear that the municipality has sobered up, my donation will be leaving Friday.