It Begins

Recommended Listening For The Week

Hot Tuna - Hot Tuna

HotTuna.com

One of my favourite albums from the 70's...

Is Ottawa Involved In Insider Trading?

Insider Trading On Income Trusts - SDA

Opposition says look for leak in Goodale's office - CBC.ca

Conservatives demand probe of tax announcement - CTV.ca

Tories, NDP call for insider trading probe - Globe & Mail

Probe income-trust leak Montreal Gazette

Letter To The Editor

I sent this to the Regina Leader Post today in response to a letter supporting more government interference in our daily lives in the health care arena.

Jackie Lukey's letter of 25 November 2005 in response to Murray Mandryk raises some interesting issues that I think require more exploration. The issue at hand is the resolution voted down at the recent NDP convention that would have prevented doctors in Saskatchewan from using the results of out of province MRI tests to treat their patients. The bottom line is that the left wing of the NDP party wants to take much more control of how Saskatchewan citizens conduct their private affairs.

In many provinces of Canada it is legal to obtain an MRI test by paying for that test privately. This is a legal business transaction. The customer receives a timely test rather spending weeks or months on a waiting list. The supplier receives a fee used to pay salaries, expenses, and if possible to make a profit. The customer isn't taking up space on a waiting list; therefore the list is shortened by one. The money used in this transaction is after tax income. The customer has already paid his taxes and done his part to support the government medical system. There are no losers here, only winners.

But some people in this country think that they should be able to dictate to others how they spend their after tax income. It isn't enough that they can't purchase a legal medical service in their own province. It isn't enough that by forcing them to go out of province for such services they have to pay more in travel expenses, making the service unaffordable for many more people. It isn't enough that people are expected to get sicker and die while waiting for medical tests in Saskatchewan that could be supplied by the private sector. The Holy Grail of forced government healthcare is more important than any of that.

The left would have us believe that their motives are pure. They only want to protect us from these "exploiters of the public" who would make a profit from our suffering. I would remind them that it is the profit motive that creates wealth and jobs in this country and not the government. If Jackie has a job, whether in the private or public sector, it only exists because someone made a profit.

Recent polls suggest that a majority of Canadians support more private healthcare options. It is time for us to move on and build a better healthcare system. The government has proven that it cannot do the job. It is time for the private sector to pick up the slack.

MacLeans Poll Story

Guitar Great Link Wray Moves On

Guitar player Link Wray, who invented the power chord, the major modus operandi of modern rock guitarists, has died. He was 76.

A native of Dunn, North Carolina, Wray's style is considered the blueprint for heavy metal and punk music.

Wray's is best known for his 1958 instrumental Rumble, 1959's Rawhide and 1963's Jack the Ripper. His music has appeared in movies like Pulp Fiction, Independence Day and Desperado.

His style is said to have inspired many other rock musicians, including Pete Townsend of the Who. David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Steve Van Zandt and Bruce Springsteen have also been quoted as saying that Wray and Rumble inspired them to become musicians. More @ Globe & Mail

Recommended Listening For The Week

1971 Fillmore East June
Frank Zappa

Easily one of Zappa's best and most obnoxious albums. Featuring Mark & Howie from The Turtles.

Vonnegut Praises Homicide Bombers

ONE of the greatest living US writers has praised terrorists as "very brave people" and used drug culture slang to describe the "amazing high" suicide bombers must feel before blowing themselves up.

Kurt Vonnegut, author of the 1969 anti-war classic Slaughterhouse Five, made the provocative remarks during an interview in New York for his new book, Man Without a Country, a collection of writings critical of US President George W. Bush.

Vonnegut, 83, has been a strong opponent of Mr Bush and the US-led war in Iraq, but until now has stopped short of defending terrorism. More @ The Australian

Via Neale News

And to think that I grew up reading books by this sorry fuck. Stupid kent, never again.

Scientific Heresy ?

Fuel's paradise? Power source that turns physics on its head

It seems too good to be true: a new source of near-limitless power that costs virtually nothing, uses tiny amounts of water as its fuel and produces next to no waste. If that does not sound radical enough, how about this: the principle behind the source turns modern physics on its head.

Randell Mills, a Harvard University medic who also studied electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, claims to have built a prototype power source that generates up to 1,000 times more heat than conventional fuel. Independent scientists claim to have verified the experiments and Dr Mills says that his company, Blacklight Power, has tens of millions of dollars in investment lined up to bring the idea to market. And he claims to be just months away from unveiling his creation.

The problem is that according to the rules of quantum mechanics, the physics that governs the behaviour of atoms, the idea is theoretically impossible. "Physicists are quite conservative. It's not easy to convince them to change a theory that is accepted for 50 to 60 years. I don't think [Mills's] theory should be supported," said Jan Naudts, a theoretical physicist at the University of Antwerp.

What has much of the physics world up in arms is Dr Mills's claim that he has produced a new form of hydrogen, the simplest of all the atoms, with just a single proton circled by one electron. In his "hydrino", the electron sits a little closer to the proton than normal, and the formation of the new atoms from traditional hydrogen releases huge amounts of energy.

This is scientific heresy. More @ The Gaurdian

Via The Daily Grail

Savages

Belt malfunction foiled would-be hotel bomber

She wore a white head scarf and a long denim dress, clothing that let her blend in with the wedding guests in the ballroom of the Radisson hotel in Amman, Jordan.

But hidden under that innocuous outfit, the Iraqi housewife sported a deadly accessory: a handmade belt crammed with TNT and ball bearings, wrapped with duct tape and red cord.

Sajida Mubarak Atrous al-Rishawi, 35, was supposed to detonate the bomb when her husband triggered his, making them the first married couple to carry out a suicide attack.

But, as she explained in a televised confession yesterday, her belt simply didn't work and so she fled the scene with hordes of innocents trying to escape the carnage.

"My husband wore a belt and put one on me," al-Rishawi said, wringing her hands nervously but speaking without emotion on state-run Jordanian TV.

"He taught me how to use it, how to pull the [primer cord] and operate it," she said.

"My husband detonated [his bomb]. I tried to explode [my belt], but it wouldn't. I left, people fled running and I left running with them." More @ New York Daily News

Recommended Listening For The Week

Joe Jackson - Jumpin Jive

Punk meets big band, great disk.

Software Scumbags

Hackers Use Sony BMG Software to Hide in PCs

A computer security firm said on Thursday it had discovered the first virus that uses music publisher Sony BMG's controversial CD copy-protection software to hide on PCs and wreak havoc.

Under a subject line containing the words "Photo approval," a hacker has mass-mailed the so-called Stinx-E trojan virus to British email addresses, said British anti-virus firm Sophos.

When recipients click on an attachment, they install malware, which may tear down a computer's firewall and give hackers access to a PC. The malware hides by using Sony BMG software that is also hidden -- the software would have been installed on a computer when consumers played Sony's copy-protected music CDs.

"This leaves Sony in a real tangle. It was already getting bad press about its copy-protection software, and this new hack exploit will make it even worse," said Sophos's Graham Cluley.

Later on Thursday, security software firm Symantec Corp. also discovered the first trojans to abuse the security flaw in Sony BMG's copy-protection software. A trojan is a program that appears desirable but actually contains something harmful.

Sony BMG's spokesman John McKay in New York was not immediately available to comment. - More @ Epoch Times & Reuters

The Register has more... & more...

The Appeasment Begins

Riots spread across borders

By Jennifer Joan Lee
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Hoodlums stormed into the streets across France for a 12th night yesterday, burning schools, cars and public buildings in defiance of government threats of curfews and the call-up of police reserves.
A leading Muslim group, the Union of Islamic Organizations in France, has issued a fatwa, or order, telling Muslims not to join in the violence.
Authorities seemed unable to control the rioting, which reached a new peak on Sunday night and spread into neighboring Belgium and Germany. More than 1,400 vehicles were torched that night, and yesterday the rioting claimed its first fatality.
Neighboring countries, fearing a spillover of the violence, have urged France to deal effectively with the uprising, which has been concentrated in impoverished suburbs populated largely by North African immigrants, mostly Muslims, and their native-born children.
German officials reported five cars set on fire Sunday night in Berlin and six in the western city of Bremen. Belgian police said five cars were set on fire outside the main train station in Brussels. More @ Washington Times

More:
The French Solution: Pay Off The Rioters - Michelle Malkin
Our World: The Paris Fall - Caroline Glick/The Jerusalem Post Via Jihad Watch
Riots in France - Thomas Sowell
De Villepin Springs Into Action - LGF

Recommended Listening For The Week

Singles Going Steady [Best of] [Original recording remastered]
Buzzcocks

Idiots On The March

Zombie Times with pictures of tha latest stupidity on the streets.

Via Michelle Malkin

Front Page Mag - The Revolution That Wasn’t

Melting Pot vs Multiculturalism, I'll Take The Pot

Wake up, Europe, you've a war on your hands

MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

Ever since 9/11, I've been gloomily predicting the European powder keg's about to go up. ''By 2010 we'll be watching burning buildings, street riots and assassinations on the news every night,'' I wrote in Canada's Western Standard back in February.

Silly me. The Eurabian civil war appears to have started some years ahead of my optimistic schedule. As Thursday's edition of the Guardian reported in London: ''French youths fired at police and burned over 300 cars last night as towns around Paris experienced their worst night of violence in a week of urban unrest.''

'French youths,'' huh? You mean Pierre and Jacques and Marcel and Alphonse? Granted that most of the "youths" are technically citizens of the French Republic, it doesn't take much time in les banlieus of Paris to discover that the rioters do not think of their primary identity as ''French'': They're young men from North Africa growing ever more estranged from the broader community with each passing year and wedded ever more intensely to an assertive Muslim identity more implacable than anything you're likely to find in the Middle East. After four somnolent years, it turns out finally that there really is an explosive ''Arab street,'' but it's in Clichy-sous-Bois.

The notion that Texas neocon arrogance was responsible for frosting up trans-Atlantic relations was always preposterous, even for someone as complacent and blinkered as John Kerry. If you had millions of seething unassimilated Muslim youths in lawless suburbs ringing every major city, would you be so eager to send your troops into an Arab country fighting alongside the Americans? For half a decade, French Arabs have been carrying on a low-level intifada against synagogues, kosher butchers, Jewish schools, etc. The concern of the political class has been to prevent the spread of these attacks to targets of more, ah, general interest. They seem to have lost that battle. Unlike America's Europhiles, France's Arab street correctly identified Chirac's opposition to the Iraq war for what it was: a sign of weakness. More @ Chicago Sun Times

More Civil War Stuff:
BBC - French riots rage despite warning
Reuters - French urban unrest hits new high
CTV - Cars torched as rioting moves into central Paris
LGF - "The Only Way to Communicate is by Burning"
WND - Radical Islam blamed for French rioting
WND - Media's protection of Muslim rioters
Washington Times
Fox News

War Bias In The MSM

The good news from Iraq is not fit to print

Jeff Jacoby

The announcement on Oct. 25 that the first genuinely democratic national charter in Arab history had been approved by 79 percent of Iraqis was a major piece of good news. It confirmed the courage of Iraq's people and their hunger for freedom and decent governance. It advanced the US campaign to democratize a country that for 25 years had been misruled by a mass-murdering sociopath. It underscored the decision by Iraq's Sunnis, who had boycotted the parliamentary elections in January, to pursue their goals through ballots, not bullets. And it dealt a humiliating blow to the bombers and beheaders -- to the likes of Islamist butcher Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who earlier this year declared ''a fierce war on this evil principle of democracy" and threatened to kill anyone who took part in the elections.

No question: If you think that defeating Islamofascism, extending liberty, and transforming the Middle East are important, it's safe to say you saw the ratification of the new constitution as the Iraqi news story of the week.

But that isn't how the mainstream media saw it. More @ Boston Globe

Via Neale News