Jay Currie

“Conservative blogger ‘Natasha’, who runs the very conservative and very well-written ‘Moose and Squirrel’ blog, has become the first blogger to announce her withdrawal of support from the Conservative Party of Canada in a letter to the influential Blogging Tories website in which she terminates her relationship over the party’s decision to appoint former OPP Commissioner Julian Fantino as a candidate in the riding of Vaughan.”

I’d resign too but not being a member makes doing so problematic.

And now that jerk factor has a blog CrApple Store.

A blog which combines the best of inside product review with the sheer horror of working retail.

I like my various Apple products but I tend to buy things three years behind. Which means the flaws have been knocked out of them. Out on the bleeding edge of retail the poor buggers at the Genius Bar have to fix stuff which is not supposed to break and swap out phones which have epically failed. Not a lot of fun.

At Natanz, for almost 17 months, Stuxnet quietly worked its way into the system and targeted a specific component—the frequency converters made by the German equipment manufacturer Siemans that regulated the speed of the spinning centrifuges used to create nuclear fuel. The worm then took control of the speed at which the centrifuges spun, making them turn so fast in a quick burst that they would be damaged but not destroyed. And at the same time, the worm masked that change in speed from being discovered at the centrifuges’ control panel. fox

Beats the heck out of bombing the facilities.

Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, a Somali-born U.S. citizen, was arrested at 5:42 p.m., 18 minutes before the tree lighting was to occur, on an accusation of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. The felony charge carries a maximum sentence of life in prison and a $250,000 fine.

The arrest was the culmination of a long-term undercover operation, during which Mohamud had been monitored for months as his alleged bomb plot developed. oregonlive.com via memorandom

Good for the FBI. But a reminder that these people, at least some of them are trying to kill us.

h/t the flea

“...Galloway and the Hamas support network in Canada will tell you that 1. dealing with Hamas is necessary because 2. Hamas is the elected government in Gaza and 3. every aid agency must go through Hamas to provide humanitarian relief to Gaza’s Palestinians.

That’s three lies right there.”

Chris the Carpenter

Can’t beat ‘em? Join ‘em. I say, that after the pat down, or during it, demand a supervisor. Then explain to the screener and supervisor what a shitty job the guy did, how much he missed and that for the safety of fellow passengers, you should be patted down a second time. See how many times you can get away with this. Keep implying (carefully) not that you are hiding something but if your search was that bad, you fear what the other passengers may have gotten away with. Might just be a fun little game. I bet you could muster 3 times… 4 might be pushing it. And, of course, one could also subtly imply enjoyment of the procedure…

Now that I think about it, is there a law against a pervert going through screening specifically to get the pat-down? I know you are limited in what you can say within those “glass walls” but, I don’t think there is a limit on how many times you can be screened (i.e. going out for a lot of smokes during a long wait). Seriously, could a very open and vocal pervert go through enough times that the TSA would REFUSE to screen him? What prevents people from making sex noises?—Nothing illegal ‘bout that, is there? Man, the more I think about this, there are some real opportunities out there to make some very viral videos.

BTW —I mean no offense to the perverts out there. Hey, 2 consenting adults and all that…. Hell, America was built by freaks of all kinds—They are the ones with all the good ideas. boing boing

I think our American friends are quite annoyed with security theatre. Bad idea to get Americans annoyed at you. They are devious.

Christy is the man to kick the Big “0” to the curb in 2012.

Sense of humour, smart, Rob Ford fat, and totally gets it. Best of all, unlike Palin who simply scares the hell of me at the thought she might become President Palin, Chris Christie is intelligent enough that he would get to work on the horrible mess he’d inherit.

Now, some of Mish’s commentors suggest Christie is a bit light on foreign policy credentials – compared to whom? Mrs. Palin? The Big “0”? My bet is that he’d do just as well, in fact a little better than most of the current, likely, contenders.

“On the night before terror fundraiser George Galloway is greeted in Vancouver by his adoring rabble of supporters, bestelling author of America Alone Mark Steyn spoke at a Hillel (Jewish students’ association) gala nearby. Steyn spoke on the theme of “First Line and Last Ditch: Israel and the World”, connecting local elements like the Galloway circus tour and the decline of free speech on Canadian campuses, with a worrying loss of “civilizational confidence” in the Western world.”

The propagandist has the rest.

Another text describes the punishment for gay sex as death and states a difference of opinion about whether it should be carried out by stoning, burning with fire or throwing the person over a cliff. bbc

When you are talking Islam, you’re talking big fun for queers.

Of course the more disturbing element to this report is that this crap is being taught to school children in England.

go read…push your keyboard away

Now that’s a headline;)

Helping a friend on one of Lucie’s defamation cases. Digging deep into the wonders of attempted evidence substitution. Wonderful material when you look closely. Not one but two attempts. How cool is that?

The whole thing is getting that Oscar Wilde tingle up my leg.

The fun part is just how funny a lot of the evidence is. It must be tough to be a super, dooper, whooper secret agent fighting the basement nazis while ignoring the actual, real live haters.

Based on today’s research I cannot imagine how much fun the trials will be. Real lawyers, real judges, no answering questions which were not asked. Vigna and Stacy on the stand. And, hey, does solicitor client privilege obtain when the guy you are with is not actually your client? Or if there is a criminal conspiracy? No doubt tw will enlighten us.

Wonderful day…and no early snow which is a bonus but it is hella cold. Which is just what you would expect in Victoria in the years of global warming.

Lovely song.

In an preliminary bout, Mr. Sernity has won against Ezra. I commented at BCL:

An interesting decision in the sense that even the biggest loser lawyer can’t be called a “fibber”. Which, so long as he is in the capacity of lawyer before a Tribunal, makes a great deal of sense. Implausible as Vigna’s lovely claim of loss of serenity may be, Ez failed to prove that it was BS. Point to Vigna.

It is a really interesting decision because it walks through the various defences which will come up whenever lucie mans up and pushes his many bits of litigation forward. It sets a very clear, but low, bar for “public interest”. It suggests that smart people will cross examine Stacey, his helpers, and Vigna on the question of Jadewarr. It pays attention to Grant.

Lots of room for appeal but, realistically, Ez was yellow carded for a minor foul. Time to suck it up and move on.

This sideshow is over. Vigna wins and remains a tool. In the main event lucie is trying reduce discovery by dropping back to the small claims court standards of simplified procedure.

The CHRC and the CHRT have entirely ceased attempting to prosecute or decide s. 13 complaints. The CHRA vis a vis speech is a dead letter.

There is, I fear, no joy in Mudville tonight. As Dawg puts it, the “Mighty Ezra” has struck out.

Tomorrow, however, is a very new day. A judge, of, admittedly minor authority, has ruled that the examination of aspects of the CHRC’s operations are in the “public interest”. While my leftie, Lucie supporting, fans are entitled to a victory lap, they might remember that the race is rather longer than this. The good judge has provided a roadmap of what must be proven and how.

Ez will, no doubt, either appeal (in which case he’ll need money) or pay the tariff (in which case he’ll need money.) So send him some!

“Blah Blah Blah We don’t hate Jews Blah Blah Blah Stay Off our property Jew”

UPDATE: That didn’t take long. I’ve already received a snotty email from Jason Cherniak, declaring that I should no longer refer to myself as a Liberal (to wit: “at some point don’t you think you should stop claiming to be a Liberal…?”). Ah, Jason: you just never change, do you? Next up: they’ll start calling Queen’s Park. Just watch.

UPDATED: Get a load of this: Jason, a Liberal official, has sent me an “Informal Libel Notice” (whatever that is) for, apparently, calling his snotty note snotty, and for revealing that he no longer wants me to “claim” that I am a Liberal. I’ve told him to beat it. the lying jackal

It is tough to make the lying jackal look anything but idiotic…but our old friend Jason Cherniak rises to the challenge.

Things must be cozy over there in the Liberal Party. Cozy indeed.

A year ago today the Climategate emails leaked from the University of East Anglia. Since then the politics of the global warming scare have changed radically. The uncertainty which was always present in the science has begun to be understood by the public, if not the political class. The extremely partisan nature of some of the scientists at the heart of climate science has been revealed. The sloppiness and lack of reasonable, open, archiving of data and code has cast significant doubt on the legitimacy of the temperature record. The willingness of senior scientists to behave illegally in the face of FOI requests has called their integrity into question.

Even the investigations, and I use the term very loosely, into Climategate have, themselves been the subject of investigation. The light coat of whitewash has not survived even the first light rain.

From a policy perspective there is not the slightest chance that the US will pass carbon reduction legislation. The Canadian Senate has just killed an Opposition bill which would have put Canada on the disastrous path of trying to control carbon emissions without having the slightest clue as to the costs and benefits of such a program. Highly subsidized carbon free technologies such as solar and ritual bird killing (windmills) are proving to be hugely expensive failures and, when economic times are tough as they are in Spain at the moment, the subsidies have to be cut.

The biggest change, however, is that the skeptics’ position as to uncertainty, modeling imprecision and the need for verification of the existing temperature record have become mainstream. So has the policy skeptical position that we need hard, verified, tested against observation, numbers before committing to radical and destructive economic measures to reduce CO2 emissions.

The political class is still playing catchup on these issues but at least now, a year after the Climategate leaks, there is no longer a monolithic “consensus” dogma to which politicians had to bow lest the soccer moms took their votes elsewhere.

Progress indeed.

H/T DR

Related…

Hate-crime convictions set bad precedent

Mark Mercer – “Judges sometimes misapply the law. It’s unfortunate, but it happens and, with luck, the mistake gets rectified down the line. One of the reasons that hate-crime legislation is so bad, though, is that it invites exactly the sorts of errors Judge MacDonald and Justice Murphy made.”