Category Archives: Current Events

Sun News: Canada’s Cluster-Fox

mulroney-and-schrieber

Former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in the Prime Minister’s office with convicted international influence-peddler Karlheinz Schreiber.  The inscription reads, “Karlheinz with best personal regards Brian Mulroney”.

Sun News, which is looking to launch a Fox-style “news” channel in Canada, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Quebecor of Montreal, whose board of directors includes former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.  So you know it’s on the up and up.  No envelopes stuffed with cash and left undeclared as income for more than a decade.  No using his position and stature to enrich himself or his company.  And Quebec of course is celebrated world-wide for its scandal-free culture in business and politics alike.  Scandal is a stranger (l’etranger) in Quebec.  So graft, bribes, kickbacks and favor-trading during the upcoming CRTC hearings are an outside chance at best.  If Brian Mulroney can do for Sun News what he did for the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada (1942-2003), we have nothing to worry about.

Quote of the Day: “War Criminal”

bush_finger_web_2

“The phrase ‘war criminal’ is loaded with negative connotations and often used pejoratively in political discourse, but that doesn’t change the fact that whether or not someone has committed war crimes is a legal question, not a moral one. A patriot is someone who loves their country. It is perfectly possible to be a patriot, to perform patriotic acts in a war, and to commit a war crime in the course of doing so.”

Conor Friedersdorf

This Week in Climate Change Denial

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtMmB5_MkIo

Real Time with Bill Maher: Ignorance as both social and environmental blight

Frye in a 1978 interview conducted shortly after his installation as Chancellor of Victoria University.  The interviewer asks him:

You talked in your Installation Address of the importance of the study of the social use of science [WE, 520].  How do you feel that might be better explored?

Frye responds:

I was thinking there of things like the ecology movement, the sense of the growing energy crisis, the preservation of the environment, the preservation of buildings in the city, and so forth.  These all add up to a very widespread social concern with the environment.  The old notion that Canada is a land of unlimited natural resources, and that all we have to do is keep mining the coal and cutting down the trees, is a very sinister and a very dangerous philosophy now–but it’s not reflected in our curriculum.  Presumably we have people in Forestry trained in the importance of the conservation of forests, but society’s use of science and technology is really an aspect of humanistic study.  I think that will become a part of our curriculum in the very near future.  It would be best taught  in the college structure because it’s a humanistic thing more than a matter of laboratories.  (CW 24, 437)

Quote of the Day (2): “Yeah, we waterboarded”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LPubUCJv58

“Yeah, we waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.  I’d do it again to save lives.”  George W. Bush to the Economic Club of Grand Rapids, Michigan, June 2nd, 2010.

Now both the former president and vice-president of the United States are unequivocally self-confessed war criminals.

Above, a demonstration of waterboarding upon a willing volunteer: and still very, very shocking because the uncontrollable animal fear is instantaneous.

Quote of the Day: “Drill, Baby, Drill”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WEl6TK4VsI

Here’s Sarah Palin’s tweet of two days ago:

She is of course lying.  Watch Chris Matthews’s report above.