36 Pictures of the Sidney Boat Building Contest Canada Day 2013

Some pictures from July 1  2013.

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25  Boat "sank" and lost two crew but the third made
it to the end, sometimes using a broom.

29

27

28

29

30 Two 10 yr olds and a 14 yr old.  Finished the course.

31

32  The youngsters again. 10,10 and 14.

33

34

35

36

Photos by HRM.

Vote our taxes.

A taxpayer Bill of Rights is coming out tomorrow. I'll celebrate if Minister Shea includes one fix:

   Let us vote our taxes.  

That means on April 30th l say how much of my personal tax pie goes to each major spending category.  The government keeps some large percentage of discretionary override but is not at liberty to disregard 100% of the taxpayer vote.  Publish the aggregate size of those slices of pie every year after April 30th.  This will be a wholesome whiff of fresh air for the budget process.

There'll be folks wanting gun registries and folks gagging at gun registry follies.  Some folks will be banning all but rape abortions and others will want women's rights to terminate a born-alive fetus.  Some would disband the army and others would send the entirety of their tax to build up our armed forces.  But overall it would be soon clear what programs please neither the right nor the left and which ones will continue debatable.

The budget distribution would be shifted a few points every year by the citizen input and the lawmakers would have a large window on the thinking of Canadians.

BTW, at the link you will learn the CRA has recently streamlined how it gets information from banks which Luc Schulz translates, "the CRA will no longer be required to present a warrant to look at your books”

The Future of Food

After World Fusion diets, after everyone has tasted every yummy nibble from every culture on earth, after everyone has been a locavore and dined on deconstructed menus, what will we eat?


We may run out of new things to try and ways to try them.

Imagine genetically re-engineering the tongue to create new taste buds and re-engineering the nose to smell a new fragrance.

Imagine a diet of unsalted tofu combined with brain waves from a gadget behind your ear that gives you a thrill with every chew and sip...

Imagine people signing on to identity diets to define their culture and affiliation, subordinating taste to messaging.

                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Christmas 1941 at the White House
How fancy can you get? Thin Toast?

The menus of my youth have disappeared.  Lettuce didn't have a name. Now it's Iceberg, along with Romaine, Arugula, Radicchio, Butter and many more.  
Coffee was coffee.  Now every restaurant offers a half dozen choices and the grocery store may have over a hundred.  My aunt would use boiled eggs, pickled beets, potatoes, carrots, and canned meat in the winter.  Now I buy blueberries, mangoes, fresh scallops and salmon, crisp apples and croissants when the snow is flying.  Dining out, you need a second language to decode the French and Italian on the menu. A hundred years ago, a feast might have "boiled potatoes", "roast beef"  "carrots" but each nibble in a nice restaurant now is burdened with a pedigree of five or six foreign adjectives and ornately presented with coloured stripes and towered shapes.  It's fun but it can only go so far.

Will food be boring?
Will we always forget enough from Monday to Friday that we can taste our corn flakes again for the very first time on Saturday?
Will we deceive our brains into believing every bite is great?
Will we engineer new tongues and noses?
Will little green men from Arcturus bring goodies that'll put us in a fine food tizzy?

"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings". - an underwater view in ancient Heracleion.

Look at this fallen Panjandrum. The head has slipped.  One diver casually lays his arm on the mighty one's thigh or arm.  Another sees an artifact instead of an aristocrat and takes a snap.  Beneath the sea, you see illustrated Shelly's poem of the man in the sand.

From the city of Heracleion, 30 ft below the waves near the mouth of the Nile.
Unseen for 1200 years.

At the feet of Ramses II.

Please, less policy from the American President. As my Mom would say: "You're not coming into the house looking like that!"

Policy plans from the first "Re-set with Russia" to the latest, "Should the US intervene in Syria" can hardly be executed without an able CEO.  Stop trying to change the world, switch to a holding pattern, and hope for a better man or woman in office in 2016.  As Lance Meyer once told me, the first requirement for any plan is a man.  Methods and money will fall in behind the leader.

No matter how keen I was as a kid to get in The House, my mother had the common sense to stop me at the door when my act needed cleaning up.  Sometimes this meant coming in humbly in my skivvies.   President Obama could learn something from her about humility and leaving messes outside the door of the White House.

Ad fail: Attractive Woman marked "Pre-Owned" as she exits car

Brought to you by Regency Auto Group and Google.

"Putin Cleaning Obama's Clock" is bad news for Canada. China owns the clock Putin is cleaning.

Canadians who grumble about sleeping next to an elephant, the USofA, have enjoyed safety in the shadow of the richest, best-armed and most feared bully on the block.  Don't count on it much longer.  Our position is exposed thanks to a feckless Obama presidency.

From Commentary Magazine:

"An irresolute amateur like Barack Obama was the best thing that the brutal but determined Putin could have hoped for.  He’s cleaning Obama’s clock". 

Russia is the little guy. China is the big guy in the school yard. China also didn't hand over Snowden and, like Russia, kept copies of the laptop information despite polite petitioning from the US. How big is China getting?  Read this from the Telegraph.

China became number one as steel consumer (1999), biggest exporter on earth (2007), biggest user of the Internet (2008), world's greatest manufacturer (2010), world's largest car market (2010), biggest market for PC's (2010). The Chinese are now the world's most important tourists, overtaking Germans and Americans in spending power. His conclusion:  The American Century ended a long time ago.

Have you been following China's expansion into ownership of the entire China Sea and its push into borderlands with India? A Chinese firm is building a new canal parallel to the Panama Canal running through Nicaragua.   China is the new elephant.

Added: Krauthammer referring to Beijing: "Nobody worries or cares about what Obama says because it carries no weight".

According to recent studies learning to speak Mandarin and Vietnamese
as a child helps make you more musical

       I'm thinking of learning Mandarin and getting with the program.

Syrian conflict shown graphically through the eyes of regional players: Stratfor

Viewpoint is everything: Syria is near the heart of Sunni sway, an outlier of the Shia culture, a border threat to Jordan and a pixillated dot in America's disjoint world view.   Saudi Arabia may have the most skin in the game.  If you are reading about Syria and it doesn't include Shia/Iran/PersianEmpire and Sunni/Saudi/Guardian-of-the-Holy-Places, its myopic crap.  Interestingly, Turkey/Ottoman Empire is omitted. Also missing are the DNA delineations of Semitic (including both Arab and Jew), Indo-European (includes much of Turkey and Iran) and African.  Competition for turf is more complex. If there were no regional players, there would still be struggle on the ground in Syria.

Thanks to Stratfor for the graphic. They have a free weekly newsletter and a great deal more behind a paywall.

Complexity isn't an excuse to quit trying to understand.  The disequilibria are going to play out with resultant vectors of action even if no one on earth understands them.
 

Make a nation of snoops to save us from Big Brother

There's a cure for Big Brother, for NSA overreach, for Government spying on your phone and charge card. Level the playing field so the little guy can push back and snoop too.

Introduce a little competition.

Think about it:

Look up any licence plate, just like the cops.Find out where the spam phone calls and emails are coming from.   See who is looking at your credit data.

Find out who has been checking out your Facebook page.

Look up the location of CCCT cameras in your city.

Check fearlessly how foreign policy is being made without being devious like Wikileaks and Snowden.

This just in: "Lawyers eye NSA data as a treasure trove of evidence in murder, divorce cases."

It's scary how the big guys can check us out, but it's not going to go away any more than having a rule that men should never glance at women's breasts will put an end to that.

It's also scary to have information overload about almost everyone becoming available to almost everyone.

It's the choice for adults, though.

We have dipped our toes into the flood with the speed-of-light internet and our smartphones

and cannot stop there, half-knowing, half-ignorant.

Our institutions are all going to change, our politicians and our newspapers, the meaning of wealth and the importance of jobs.  With this will change the associations large and small that we create to navigate this life.

I like my privacy but the meaning of private is changing too.

What if China hacks the NSA Data Trove?

"China hack the US government? Ridiculous" writes Instapundit dryly.
"When", not "What if" is the only question.
Think about it.
Who just won the annual NSA-sponsored hacking contest?  Two Americans, ten Russians and twenty Chinese out of 70 finalists.  (Computerworld, linked by The Atlantic.)


Chuang Tzu commented:

In taking precautions against thieves who cut open satchels, search bags, and break open boxes, people are sure to cord and fasten them well, and to employ strong bonds and clasps; and in this they are ordinarily said to show their wisdom. When a great thief comes, however, he shoulders the box, lifts up the satchel, carries off the bag, and runs away with them, afraid only that the cords, bonds, and clasps may not be secure; and in this case what was called the wisdom (of the owners) proves to be nothing but a collecting of the things for the great thief.

Peer review fail, like finding Mummy's been sleeping with the Milkman.

Peer review of scientific journals is corrupt if it isn't blind
and the gatekeepers of knowledge go tribal
to boost the papers of friends and high-status players.

Check this gem discovered by smalldeadanimals.com, published by the Cambridge University Press, abstracting work by Peters and Ceci.

“The present investigation was an attempt to study the peer-review process directly, in the natural setting of actual journal referee evaluations of submitted manuscripts. As test materials we selected 12 already published research articles by investigators from prestigious and highly productive American psychology departments, one article from each of 12 highly regarded and widely read American psychology journals with high rejection rates (80%) and nonblind refereeing practices. (my bolding). With fictitious names and institutions substituted for the original ones (e.g., Tri-Valley Center for Human Potential), the altered manuscripts were formally resubmitted to the journals that had originally refereed and published them 18 to 32 months earlier. Of the sample of 38 editors and reviewers, only three (8%) detected the resubmissions. This result allowed nine of the 12 articles to continue through the review process to receive an actual evaluation: eight of the nine were rejected. Sixteen of the 18 referees (89%) recommended against publication and the editors concurred. The grounds for rejection were in many cases described as “serious methodological flaws.” A number of possible interpretations of these data are reviewed and evaluated”. 

I love to find out things and feel broken-hearted that researchers I want to trust are untrustworthy. It's like learning Mummy has been sleeping with the Milkman.  (I'm old enough to remember milkmen going door to door.)

The rejection rate reported is so high we are losing good ideas. Self-publishing on the internet may work-around this.

The comely figure of justice with a blindfold and scales is passé for some. I like her just fine.

Ramirez cartoon: Holder investigates self, finds clue.

h/t powerlineblog.com

GM Mosquitoes that don't smell people.

If she doesn't smell you, she doesn't bite you! Imagine female mosquitoes that don't need swatting or spraying because they don't notice you are there.  Their other prey still smells tasty but humans disappear from the mosquito radar. The DNA engineering has been done at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

How would this spread?  In the Okanagan Valley, a related experiment worked to save apples from the Codling Moth.  A lot of sterile codling moths were released, year after year, into infected orchards and gradually the reproductive success of moths looking for hot Lepidopterans fell to manageable levels.

Will the No-GM-Anti-Monsanto crowd get behind this zero pesticide solution? Tens of thousands of malaria deaths might end and you and I can have our comfort in the Canadian Bush without rubbing and spraying chemicals about.

Jets, twits and ships show where world power lies. The Eastern Seaboard, not the whole USA is one hub. If Europe were united, it'd be number one instead.

These three maps teach  more about the world than a stack of college texts.  We live in a three pole world made of China, Industrial Europe and the East Coast of the USA.  The USA West Coast, the UAR, Rio de Janeiro, Moscow, SE Asia and Japan are secondary hubs. The rest of us live in the backwoods.

Global flightpaths from Markieta via the BBC

Traffic is the key. It's trade and communication.  The three maps agree about where it's happening. There are some oddities.  China doesn't shine on Twitter because it has Weibo instead. The Canary Islands and to a lesser extent, the Caribbean beaches have a lot of leisure traffic.   The world news is about nuclear weapons and the Middle East but the daily business of the world is the three hubs and their sidekicks.  Is China rising?  It's already risen.

Twitter traffic (except Weibo).

Europe looks like it could be number one if it were one nation and one language. Canadian cultural affinities with Europe and the UK mislead us into thinking we are on the same team. Don't believe the talk about West vs East or US vs Russia & China.  Russia is just a sidelight in this story.  There are three big teams and they are regions, not legislatures.  We're little and our first order of business is to exploit our relationship with the Eastern Seaboard.  China and Europe are next in line.

Shipping Lanes (The Atlantic)

As Stuart McLean famously wrote:
We may not be big, but we're small!
Canada!!

Update: See link to view from outer space for one day of all the ships on earth in motion.

Peace is easy when neighbours don't spill blood.

It's easy for Canadians to talk peace. No one within a day's walk or even a day's drive has ever killed an uncle or a sister or a buddy of mine or even a great great grandmother of mine.  It's easy to pooh pooh revenge and want the peoples of the world to make nice with each other, to just get along.

In Syria last month.

Syria and Iraq, the Congo and Burma, Egypt, Serbia, and Lebanon are more like the majority where communal violence has destroyed the lives of many people who live within walking distance of each other. There's no sweetheart fix, no kiss the booboo so the cut won't hurt.  Men who have cruelly slaughtered, burned and beheaded their neighbours have gotten away with it, and seen their children's children.  How do we get a second chance to live in harmony?

The basic cure is death.  The people who remember the evil done will pass away in time and anger subsides.  Another basic cure is sex.  Over time, the outliers of hostile communities are attracted to one another and get pregnant. (Romeo and Juliet wed instead of suicide.) The edges between the groups get fuzzy.  Raising children from dual cultures is tough on the kids but makes bridges between enemies.

The third cure is transformative faith.  Sometimes people of great difference will unite behind an idea that outweighs their cultural baggage.

The famous closet

A fourth cure is a transformative environment where the rules all change.  One example is the discovery of new largely-unsettled lands like North America where far-flung cultures often settled down as neighbours.  (Kirkland Lake was an international town where your neighbours spoke a different language at home than your own family.) Another is the discovery of new technology that easily links disparate folk for pennies a day. That's your basic smartphone, and everything else waiting to spill out of Fibber McGee's closet.  Maybe the next century will have off-earth settlements.

I used to think politics would make a difference.

If you're in a hurry for peace, expect to be gravely disappointed.
But don't give up.
Besides, a little conflict is necessary to test things.

Added: Nearly three hundred years after the Battle of Culloden and the effort to hunt down Bonnie Prince Charlie by the English (Catholic Jacobites) allied with Scottish Lowlanders (The Campbells), my dear sweet grandmother that wouldn't hurt a fly had a hard spot in her heart for both lots.

Yen sinking as Japan starts a to-the-death currency war? Deals on Japanese cars and screens coming soon.

John Mauldin makes the case that a once-in-a-lifetime currency war has just started.  Japan can't inflate at home because a 1% rise in bond interest would bring debt service to 80% of the national budget. Running down the yen by 20% a year, every year, will export the deflation problem but the US$, the Euro and the Renminbi will fight back.  This is the opening salvo in the biggest currency war of our lifetime.

Japan is screwed or "painted into a corner" as Mauldin says.  An aging population, shrinking workforce and no prospect of high productivity gains per worker has shut the escape hatch of growth.  The trade deficit has to be covered.  The massive money printing hasn't stopped deflation and Japan's gross debt to GDP ratio is rising to over 240%, an almost unthinkable number.

Read his article and, for that matter, subscribe to the free weekly newsletter too.

"Weakest President Ever" (Saudi paper). Canada shouldn't sleep too close to the elephant when it's waffling about.

According to an op-ed in the London daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, Barack Obama is the weakest president in the history of the United States.  I think diplomatic moves by Canada towards the US should emphasize Congress, not the presidency until he's put out to pasture.

Quote: Obama’s handling of the Syrian crisis had proven his failure as president, showing him as completely lacking in leadership ability, hesitant and diffident, and overall the weakest president in the history of the United States.  (MEMRI quoted by Gateway Pundit).

Is the quote newsworthy?  From Wikipedia:

The New York Times in 2005 called Asharq Al-Awsat "one of the oldest and most influential in the region". Although published under the name of a private company, the Saudi Research and Marketing Group, the paper was founded with the approval of the Saudi royal family and government ministers, and is noted for its support of the Saudi government. The newspaper is owned by Faisal bin Salman, a member of the Saudi royal family.

We both know that "put out to pasture" probably means "Secretary General of the UN".  I remember going out on Halloween on the first-ever penny drive by UNICEF thinking, as kids like to do, that the world would now be a safe place with kindly overseers.  If you blend "The Chicago Way" with the UN, will the soup taste different?  And how will Americans like seeing their ex-president on the opposing team?

Power, money and lies in Washington will be tested by this tumult of emergent crises. What leaders will appear?

Richard Fernandez identifies ”Emergent events”:    The whole shebang is going critical, like a reactor running out of control.  ..   The next few weeks will feature an increasing spate of these things. Like a building in the process of collapse, first one beam goes, then two, then three, and before you know it the whole tower is gone.

If the Republicans come in on this — which they must — it will be as a way to avoid the scandal of saying nothing. And that suggests that trouble engulfing Capitol City will affect not just a party, but will go to the heart of business as usual. The insiders are discovering that something’s not quite right any more; something has backed up in the plumbing. Things are not going away like they should. Not for the administration. Maybe not for anybody.

A man for his time.

These headlines .. about pressure cookers, local crime in Philadelphia, a sideshow in Libya ... are proxy words.  The real subject is power, money, and lies, and they way these work together by the Potomac.

Different leaders will be coming forward when values realign.  Churchill is an example.  Oxygen is available for strong men and women whose voices were previously dismissed.

Rejected by the White House
Honoured by others.

The internet is rewiring everything. The costs of getting a public hearing are becoming vanishingly small. The costs of keeping secrets away from the governed are climbing rapidly. A dozen years have hardly scratched the surface of the change that is coming.  Who knows what shape it will take? This I know, what worked before will adapt or disappear.

NDP deserves to win in BC for remembering the Internet exists.

On all signs the NDP has internet contact and the Liberal has not.

I drive through a dozen BC electoral districts in the south-west each week and see the road sign war is a saw-off between Liberals and the NDP with two independents looking strong. (Vicki Huntington and John Van Dongen).  But look at the signs.  No Liberal signs have an internet link.  I parked the car and walked over to be sure a link wasn't hidden in the small print.  A recent PEW poll finds 39% get their news on-line.  How can a serious contender skip that?  I browse a lot of pages daily and often find one or two NDP on-line ads on a site but have yet to see a single one for the Libs.  What gives?

The other half of the political spectrum is pretty near empty. Near Langley on Zero Avenue I found a small sign for John Cummins, half the size of those above.  Other Langley candidates had a number of roadside ads in the same stretch.

Count your blessings at the ballot box

After 45 years as a Canadian voter, I've never been intimidated or even exposed to partisan information at a voting place, always felt the identification checks were sufficient to keep the voters honest and always been confident my vote was not just counted but also reported.  What's not to like?

The shenanigans inside Canadian political parties to register their own voters for conventions are a different story.  The bizarro stories from the US where entire precincts in Philadelphia voted 100% Democrat are a different story.   But here in British Columbia and speaking as a civic, provincial and national voter, we have sound procedures.




Maybe one exception: My vote went straight into a computer in one civic election. There was no whisper of fraud but there was no proof there wasn't. It's like when you buy gas with a credit card and the pump screen prompts, "Do you want a receipt?" I don't, but I always say I do, just to keep them honest. Old fashioned paper ballots work fine.

I like on-line polls and think they should be used publicly for every bill to get a sense of the electorate and keep it public. Tens of thousands would give opinions on some issues.  Naturally, groups will game the polls but counter-measures will limit the spin. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business has become a political force by simply polling their members in depth across the entire nation, reporting the results to their members and to all relevant legislative bodies. Just don't let on-line polling replace two accountable moments: My paper vote in the ballot box and my representative's votes in the House.

(Anyone interested in helping develop a web site for fraud-screened massive on-line polls of all bills before the House of Commons?)

Okanagan goodbye

Leaving the Okanagan in spring

I peopled your walks in my middle years

but  leave to make an end.

I won’t be afoot in your hills in a year’s turning

in a tear’s yearning,

though Ponderosa was a word warm on my lips as mother’s milk.

I’ll not  mis-hear again the speech of mountains,

Balsam root flowers that message the haste of spring and

the teaching of rabbit brush lecturing the hurry of fall.

I cannot forget what I never grasped.

I’m seeing absences –

The unanswered rings where fish ducks dove,

and ghosts of the kids who filled my life.

If rabbit brush and balsam root should know my name

they would call me back

to the Okanagan.

I forget with casual ease more beauty than wealth can buy.

It’s the privilege of an old man to cherish

and let slip, to forget and slip away.

I’ve a message for the spring screes, butter-cupped and

pierced with shooting star:

Remember me, a drunk who forgets his limit!

A man should make a poem to die.

BC: Turn the light on the Right back on.

If you don`t want left and centre-left politicians in BC, you are nearly out of luck this time round. The BC Conservatives left 40% of BC`s riding with no candidate at all and they have no party competing for that voice. BC Blue has reported on their squabbles.  Some of that unused energy has relocated to "Independent".

I spend time in two ridings:  Saanich North & The Islands has no candidate to the right of the Liberals.  Boundary Similkameen has one but he is a write-in candidate. See the picture.  He writes himself in as an Indpendent over top of the Conservative sign he made up first! (You will like his cattle-butting video clip).


In the list below you see gaps under "BC Conservative" but quite a few listed as "Others". There's a huge opportunity but not this election.  Hold your breath and mark your ballot.

What would I like to see? "If you care about freedom.."

Europe, we're going to eat your lunch.

From Powerline: "If you want to understand how the United States is suddenly eating everyone’s lunch when it comes to energy, see the chart below, from the Financial Times.  "


In Canada, we've got lots of gas too and it's not upsetting my digestion.  When the wheels of our industry can turn for a third the price of the overseas competition, what's not to like?  

Russia is getting indigestion too.  "A seismic shift in energy geopolitics .. is under way as Gazprom’s dominance fades. The company has long had a near-stranglehold on gas supplies to Western and Eastern Europe"

Poll for BC Voters: Is it ABCD for you?

Thanks to a smalldeadanimals report which struck a chord with me:
ABCD means you'd vote for Anyone But Christy or Dix.
Do you agree?

How will you vote if it's ABCD?

'Jay Leno: AP will replace "Illegal Immigrant" with "undocumented democrat".'

You'll never get that one out of your head.  Link is to video of Jay via Gateway Pundit site.

What's next after Bipartisan Abdication? Blame the Prez.

George Wills quotes Jim Webb:
“President Obama has arguably established the authority of the president to intervene militarily virtually anywhere without the consent or the approval of Congress, at his own discretion and for as long as he wishes.”

Wills further observes that an invertebrate congress and the current Imperial President point to more of the same.  When leaders duck responsibility, there will always be a scapegoat when trouble comes, as it surely will.  The much ballyhooed and even loved President Obama has been busy bypassing and ignoring congress but both parties will turn on him when it suits.  It will suit when the American public gets fed up and tells Congress to fix it or beat it.

excerpted from the Washington Post.

March 28 2013

Red Meat Primer on Canadian Politics from a US Observor.

This is pretty straightforward stuff.  Where have you read it all laid out so plainly before? A preamble on the bad (lots of red meat) and good in Canada and a summary of Mulcair, Shiny Pony and Harper's prospects in 2015.

"The forthcoming election in 2015 promises to be a watershed event. An NDP victory would propel Canada down the same ruinous slope charted by the U.S. under the suzerainty of Barack Obama. A Liberal ascendancy under Justin Trudeau would resurrect the same hackneyed policies of earlier Liberal administrations....The re-election of a majority Conservative government, with its emphasis on free enterprise, resource development, expanded markets, greater national homogeneity and fiscal viability, is indispensable to the health and resilience of the nation, so that Canada, unlike many other Western democracies, might remain a country still reasonably good to live in."

David Solway writing for PJMedia.com  Read the whole article.. 

That preamble on the "bad" takes a swing at the CBC, the Supreme Court, Indian leadership and more.

"(Canada) suffers from a growing Muslim demographic and the cultural tensions this brings in its wake; is home to a potent eco-constituency that has bought into the Global Warming canard; shelters a plethora of misnamed Human Rights Commissions that are nothing more than kangaroo courts designed to stifle honest debate. ... harbors a persistent secessionary movement in the province of Quebec; boasts a Supreme Court filled to the brim with superannuated, politically correct apparatchiks who have no compunction about unanimously legislating against both the theory and practice of free speech; tolerates an aboriginal racket that exploits the country’s bad conscience and whose band chiefs prosper obscenely at taxpayers’ expense, thanks to an obsolete Indian Act; subsidizes a left-leaning national broadcaster, the CBC, that can always be counted on to slant the news in favor of a “progressivist” agenda."  (David Solway, again).

Pro-choice hypocrisy. Their choice, not your choice is good.

See Charlie Brown style cartoon at Never Yet Melted
and weep.

Few Americans use prostitutes. Kinsey spin discounted.

From livescience.com

When the Kinsey report on male sexual behavior was published in 1948, it revealed among its then-scandalous findings that up to 69 percent of American men had paid for sex at some point in their lives.

(From a new large-sample study): About 14 percent of American men said they paid for sex at some point in their lives, but just 1 percent said they visited a prostitute in the past year (2010), according to the study, which is, in part, based on data collected as part of the General Social Survey by researchers at the National Opinion Research Center.

Kinsey

"While it is noteworthy to recognize that the 1 percent of adult men who paid for sex in 2010 still result in a large number of customers, there is no credible evidence to support the idea that hiring sex workers is a common or conventional aspect of masculine sexual behavior among men in the United States," study researcher Christine Milrod, of the University of Portland, said in a statement.

Added:  Kinsey's studies used prison populations (25%), male prostitutes (4%) and included filming sex in his own home.  Kinsey was "polyamorous and bisexual".   Don't discount his findings but don't believe the spin.

EU thieves being bested by Russian thieves in Cyprus. UPDATED

While the front door of the banks is locked in Cyprus, money is flying out the back door.  ZeroHedge discovered  the London branches of two big Cyprean banks remain open and permit unlimited withdrawals.  Since 20% of deposits came from Russia, I'm convinced that Russian money is heading out the back door.  Cyprus won't have to worry about angry oligarchs or mafia types.

Link 1:  Have the Russians already quietly withdrawn all their cash from Cyprus?

            Sourced from Reuters via ZeroHedge.  

            Second source:  "But unlike Cypriot banks, which have placed a €100-per-day on ATM withdrawals, a Laiki Bank spokesperson said yesterday that the bank’s London branches were open as normal and there were no limits on withdrawals and no change to conditions".

Link 2:  Russian Withdrawals Quantified As Cyprus Central Bank Set To Expand Emergency Credit By Up To €3 Billion

The surprised guy looks like
another banker.
Maybe not a surprise after all.

Remember Cyprus' financial system is worth about eight times the Cyprean GDP ($18 billion euros) and that Russians had placed about $31 billion euros in Cyprus, about 20% of the wealth under attack.  I don't care for oligarchs but it burns my butt thinking of money bureaucrats in the EU stealing from everyone's savings to cover for people like themselves who are in deep debt they can't pay back and "too big to fail".    Sometimes public policy is just wealth transfer from the weak to the strong.  If you punish savings and reward borrowing, less is saved and more is borrowed. This is not rocket science. As others have pointed out, if you risk your own money and fail, you are hurt but if you risk other people's money and fail, the whole system is wounded.  (OPM = other people's money).

This may be more smoke than fire if the London branches are limited in the funds they can access.

UPDATE:  There are many corrupt players back on the Island!  Read this insider account published in Zero Hedge.    The story in this posting emerges easily from what went before.  Also, Part 2.

Tire store: Take your leaks here

Seen in town:

US and EURO area exports, twined like lovers.

US and EURO exports go up and down together like lovers.  It's not a zero-sum competition; they're riding the same global rollercoaster.  h/t  Instpundit, linking Goldman Sachs.

Blogging Tories survey.

What do Blogging Tories blog about?
A count of the last two pages shows:
57% Canada linked stories.
28% US linked stories
15% Various conservative or world viewpoints.
I counted all XP pipeline stories as Canadian.

Added:  And a little spam from someone flogging wordpress.com   "Delusional Spin" and "Oh Canada", various names, all standing out for having about two hundred tweets.

My friend who blogs about finance told me,
"Canada is irrelevant."  (He was talking about world finance).

World map scaled to national wealth.
We're that pale blue bit at the upper left.

Our American neighbour is ten times our size and gets half the headline space BT gives to Canadian stories.  Maybe that's about right, a 20:1 reduction.  Are we that much different from the fans of US stardom who watch ET and the Oscars and read People Magazine?  I am tempted every day to read about US political figures and overlook what's happening at home unless someone raises a big stink.

Do you remember when Gzowski's Morningside radio show had a segment called, "The News From ....". Someone would phone in from Sauerkraut, Saskatchewan to report the big news in their neighbourhood that day.  It included flat tires, girl guide cookie drives, the wheat board, things large and small.  (I haven't the stomach to listen to CBC news any more but there was a time.).  Our own news is always interesting even if the rest of the world doesn't tune in.

While serenading the CBC, let me add the great motto of The Vinyl Cafe:
"We may not be big,
but we're small!"

Footnote to "Canada is irrelevant". Did you know the Bank of Nova Scotia may be the best known bank in Chile, Peru and Jamaica, the three I know a smidgen about?