Repositioning the donkey while Obama dismounts: Barack more likely to antagonize Dems than Republicans after Mid Terms.

With Republicans up in both houses, expect a family feud.  Obama is more likely to be pushing back at angry Democrat pols than the Republicans he has been governing without for six  years.

Awkward

The new dynamic will be repositioning the Donkey while Obama dismounts.   I  think the left will join forces with the right to steal any executive order triumphs from the diminished president. Immigrating millions of new voters by decree of the imperial president will meet bipartisan opposition.

Dems nervous about mid-terms

Clinging to hope.  The photo makes me think of unhappy Democrats having a melt-down.

Dog going to the vet to "take his medicine" with great reluctance.

Black Folks Rebel Against the Democrat Machine

Drudge promotes game-changer video that may move a lot of black votes in 2014 and 2016.  In a city like Chicago run by blacks, the Democrat machine is abusing their own people, offering a "turkey" on voting day and making you a turkey the rest of the time.  I'm a Honky WASP sort of person but am persuaded by the black plain-spoken men in the video.  This time it's for real.


"Black folks is in an abusive black leadership relationship"

Ghomeshi Meltdown at National Post

Canadian Cincinnatus has already posted on this but a screenshot of seven (count them) front page stories about a rough-sex radio station employee gives you pause.  I wish Conrad Black still owned NP.

Click to enlarge NP screen shot 9am PDST Oct 28

Ebola Spa: A market solution to quarantine

Mickey Kaus:  "What’s needed is a quarantine so luxurious that health care workers will look forward to it   ..   Volunteer health care workers are not exactly encouraged to make the trip to West Africa if they know they'll have to spend 21 days in a tent with a portable toilet on their return."  

The writer, a thoughtful Democrat, envisages Government buying and stocking the resort but this is the perfect public-private partnership giving private enterprise a way to prosper while serving the public good.

People in a Florida quarantine isolation camp

h/t Instanpundit.   A few words in the opening quote were shifted around.

Personal note:  My father was born in a quarantine camp on Torrens Island near Adelaide after coming off a ship from Canada.

Cup of cocoa, then bed, keeps you smart in the head.

A cup of hot cocoa with honey, sounds nice before bed.  Maybe it will also keep your memory from fading as you age. The study at Columbia showed significant memory improvement in a seniors group fed high-flavonol drinks derived from cocoa beans.  After three months, many had memories like 40 year olds instead of 60 year olds with brain change being noticed in the dentate gyrus.

Caveats:  "high-flavonol" isn't quite the same as "chocolate" and the study which used 37 senior volunteers should be replicated.

Excerpted from Science Daily News where you'll find more detail about the researchers and their results.







While revived faculties is the topic, I'll add some senior's humour:

"Auntie George and Uncle Mabel

Fainted at the breakfast table.

But Ovaltine has set them right

and now they do it morn and night,

and Uncle George is hoping soon

to do it in the afternoon"

   
                                                                               (Kudos to my late Aunt Nan)

Wear the uniform proudly.

From "A Bear's Rant":

Telling Canadian soldiers not to wear the uniform in public is like telling women they must dress modestly or be raped.  Follow the link.

Following the shootings, the Defense Department issued an advisory to military personnel to avoid wearing their uniforms in public. Is that really the message we want to send to terrorists? Do we really want them to celebrate that they have so frightened us that our military are afraid to publicly wear their uniforms in their own country?
That strikes me to be more than just a little like telling women to dress modestly lest they be raped or assaulted.

See:
Australian Muslim leader compares uncovered women to exposed meat

How many days until the world ends? Climate Cassandras from Gore on down screw up in their own words.

Posted at Wattsupwiththat by Jimbo:   Reminds me of the Jehovah Witnesses movable goal posts for the immanent return of Jesus and their debate about how immanent "immanent" is.
h/t smalldeadanimals.

Moscow-Pullman Daily News – 5 July 1989
“governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.”
[Noel Brown - New York office of the United Nations Environment Program]
=======================

The Vancouver Sun – May 11, 1982
Lack of such action would bring “by the turn of the century, an envi-ronmental catastrophe which will witness devast-tation as complete, as ir-reversible as any nu-clear holocaust.”
[Mostafa Tolba - Executive director of the United Nations Environment Program]
=======================

New York Times – November 18, 2007
…..The IPCC chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, an engineer and economist from India, acknowledged the new trajectory. “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late,” Pachauri said. “What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.”…..
=======================

Independent – 20 October 2009
[SPEECH]
Gordon Brown: We have fewer than fifty days to save our planet from catastrophe
……..Copenhagen must be such a time.

There are now fewer than 50 days to set the course of the next 50 years and more. So, as we convene here, we carry great responsibilities, and the world is watching. If we do not reach a deal at this time, let us be in no doubt: once the damage from unchecked emissions growth is done, no retrospective global agreement, in some future period, can undo that choice. By then it will be irretrievably too late….
=======================

National Post – 2009?
… In the summer, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon insisted “we have four months to save the planet.”…
=======================

Guardian – 3 November 2009
We only have months, not years, to save civilisation from climate change
…….Lester R Brown is president of Earth Policy Institute and author of Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization.
=======================

WWF – 7 December 2009
12 days to save the planet!
…“The world has given a green light for a climate deal. But the commitments made so far won’t keep the world under 2° of warming, This has to change over the next 12 days. …
[WWF-UK’s head of climate change, Keith Allott]
=======================

Guardian – 18 January 2009
‘We have only four years left to act on climate change – America has to lead’
Jim Hansen is the ‘grandfather of climate change’ and one of the world’s leading climatologists…..

“We cannot now afford to put off change any longer. We have to get on a new path within this new administration. We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world. America must take the lead.”
=======================

The Star – Mar 24 2009
‘We have hours’ to prevent climate disaster
…Recently, Prince Charles has said we have only an estimated 100 months. Unless the world comes together and negotiates a meaningful agreement to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions nine months from now – at the Copenhagen meeting of the United Nations climate conference in December – another 90 months won’t help. We have hours to act to avert a slow-motion tsunami that could destroy civilization as we know it.

Earth has a long time. Humanity does not. We need to act urgently. We no longer have decades; we have hours. We mark that in Earth Hour on Saturday….
[Elizabeth May of Canadian Green Party]
=======================

And Al  (Ice Cap Gone) Gore, of course.

Best political speech ever: Ronald Reagan, "A Time For Choosing"

The Montreal Massacre had a Muslim link too

I don't remember seeing this in the news, but Marc Lépine was the son of an Algerian muslim, Rachid Liass Gharbi.   Marc changed his first name from "Gamil".   The dad was abusive and "non-practicing" but it looks to me like the culture of Mohammed played a role.  Marc went after women in non-traditional roles.   What are the odds nowadays he'd have been on-line posting approvingly about ISIS before turning butcher?      Substitute "stick" for "gun" and I'm reminded of the Saudi Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.

On December 6, 1989, Lépine walked into the École Polytechnique de Montréal. There, he entered a second-floor classroom where he separated the men and women and then ordered the approximately fifty men to leave. Claiming that he was fighting feminism, he shot the nine women who remained, killing six and injuring the rest.

h/t commenter at smalldeadanimals

Avatar of the average male. Netherlands looking tops.

See the avatars for yourself. The average Dutch male is much taller and slimmer than the white American male.   Nothing pretty here, just the average shape.  Original article at The Atlantic.

US dethroned by three inches.
Crown goes to the Netherlands.
US (and Canada) looking a little soft.

Left to Right:  US, Japan, Holland, France.

Dems will rewrite history to get rid of love affair with Barack Obama.

  Ramirez cartoon.  "Hello? Tattoo removal service?"

Easter Island discovered America

A genetic study shows Easter Islanders have 8% American Indian ancestry and the DNA was picked up in the AD1300-1500 period before the Spanish and English got their licks or dicks in. (The genomic tally also shows 16% of European origin.)   Easter Island was reached about AD 1200 and it is easy to imagine some settlers continuing on to find America because if they explored to the east, they couldn't miss.  A few must have made it back.

Reported in Science Daily News.
Something else interesting about the 900 statues they built:  Most of the carved statue is sunk below grade.

To be fair, the first reported European on Easter island  is neither Spanish nor English.  In 1722  Dutchman, Jacob Roggeveen, landed there.

Is fatal cancer setting Putin's schedule of accelerated aggressions?

The New York Post publishes rumours pointing to spinal or pancreatic cancer that gives Vladimir Putin a short time to leave a legacy of strong borders and respect for Russia.   You may not like Russia but it does have hard-to-defend borders on the west, and impaired ocean access through the Black and Baltic seas.

From the Financial Post

This can explain the brass balls threat of using nuclear weapons, expropriation of the Crimea, the pardon of Khodorkovsky, repeated air incursions into Japanese,  Nato  and American airspace and threats to the Baltic states. Is his face a little puffy from steroid treatments, the Post asks?

Rumours should be mistrusted but not ignored.   h/t HotAir for the link.

Karate chop-the-block GIF in slo-mo.

Dust flies off the block, the fingers are assels in the breeze.
Found at Ace of Spades
If you persist towards a goal
and give 100% against the odds,
what you accomplish may look impossible to others.

Courts hide behind "Judicial Restraint" to favour Big Government and its parasites.

A new book argues that right-leaning judges (you read that right) erode citizen protection from Big Government by invoking judicial restraint, which is  "a theory of judicial interpretation that encourages judges to limit the exercise of their own power. It asserts that judges should hesitate to strike down laws unless they are obviously unconstitutional".    h/t Instapundit.

From reviews of Neily's "Terms of Engagement: How Our Courts Should Enforce the Constitution's Promise of Limited Government" at Amazon:

“Clark Neily’s elegant essay slays the idea that ‘judicial restraint’ is always a virtue. It often amounts to judicial abdication. Neily explains that judges must judge to defend the rights that government exists to secure.”
—George F. Will

“Through the use of compelling real-world cases and remarkably clear, accessible and accurate explanations of current law, Clark Neily exposes the legal charade by which, in the name of ‘restraint,’ judges have stacked the deck in favor of those who use laws and regulations to line their own pockets. Required reading for all who care about their liberties and the Constitution that is supposed to protect them.”
—Randy Barnett, Professor at Georgetown Law School


“Clark Neily weaves constitutional analysis with anecdotes in service of large principle. His basic principle is that a squishy policy of judicial deference disserves his clients, the public at large, and the critical role of judicial oversight in a democracy. He is right on all counts. A great read for lawyers and nonlawyers interested in the real-world consequences of judicial decision making.”
 —Richard Epstein, Professor at the New York University School of Law

Data breach at the White House? UPDATE: It's for real and Russian

Developing story, reported at Powerlineblog.

"We have yet to hear from the White House press office in response to our request for a comment on our reader’s report that a major network problem has hit the computers used by staff in the Executive Office of the President. Our source, however, updated us with the latest on the issue overnight. He believes it is expected that news of the problem (whatever it is) will soon break publicly, if not today. Describing the problem as a “major data loss,” he believes that repair is expected to take weeks.   From what he understands, this is a serious problem. He asserts: “We are potentially talking OMB, USTR, ONDCP, OPM, and the White House itself(!). Top-line executive deliberations. Gone. Stolen? No idea.”

An update: Limited acknowledgment.  Perhaps only "non-secure" areas were breached.
Major update at the Washington Post:  The White House acknowledges the event which was detected two weeks ago and traced to Russia.  An ally (Britain) alerted Washington to the problem in the "non-secure" part of the President's office network.   Further comment at Powerlineblog emphasizing that the entire network of reporters kept silent for two weeks and somehow it had to be a foreign ally to tell us what was happening under our own noses.

Cash for Trash

Don't get your pants in a knot about the attack of the killer landfills.  All the garbage ever generated in North America from day one to a hundred years in the future will fit in a hole less than three miles to a
side.  ( What if the U.S. put all its trash in one giant landfill?  Take the numbers and convert to cubic miles, top it up 10% for Canada and add a fudge factor for the first couple hundred start up years).

I wish I could live long enough to buy that landfill and turn it into gold, paper and fertilizer, steel and  fuel.  The technology is around to do this, it's just inconveniently expensive at the moment.  If you've ever watched a cream separator at work on a farm, you'll know what I mean.  Raw stuff goes in the top, and pure yummy cream and milk comes out the bottom spouts.

Cream on the left, skim on the right.
I used to have one of these.

How can you keep a straight face watching your neighbours dividing their little pile of debris into bottles and papers and light compostables and heavy compostables, stuff for the metal recycling depot and styrofoam to quarantine at a special corner of the regional dump.  To question this is to question their faith.   Maybe Christ didn't die on the cross to redeem them from sin but they sure as heck believe that paper goes in the paper box.

If you value your time at even the minimum wage and times it by the number of mostly wasted hours citizens spend with their garbage, you might get the idea that the money would be better spent learning how to mine junk.  Capital that should go into better, market-based landfill technology is replaced by hundreds of millions of hours from volunteer little "green" helpers with blue boxes.

Crazy.

Misfits for Mohammed

There will be more lone shooters creeping out of the slums of Mohammed.  Islam is an ideology willing to give status and licence to killers who tack the name of Allah to their predation.   Just be glad the Jihadi's flag-bearer, ISIS, doesn't have a seat in the UN.  Then Misfits for Mohammed will be replaced by Undercover Islamic Warriors.    ("Warriors" sounds better, doesn't it?  That's the whole idea).

At least we're not calling it road rage or political protest when Misfits for Mohammed kill people in Canada.  Thank you Stephen Harper for saying "Terrorism".

We know the response will be incremental like the response to Ebola, but the bad actor can  grow exponentially for a time.  A little more glory for ISIS and  home-grown crooks with Islamic names will quickly hoist the black flag to join the winning team, and will kill with "Allahu akbar" on their lips and a kaffiyeh on their shoulders.  (Add "loot and rape" to "murder" and you get the picture.)

Below excepted from "The Relgiion of Peace":

"The Quran contains at least 109 verses that call Muslims to war with nonbelievers for the sake of Islamic rule.  Some are quite graphic, with commands to chop off heads and fingers and kill infidels wherever they may be hiding.  Muslims who do not join the fight are called'hypocrites' and warned that Allah will send them to Hell if they do not join the slaughter.
Unlike nearly all of the Old Testament verses of violence, the verses of violence in the Quran are mostly open-ended, meaning that they are not restrained by the historical context of the surrounding text.  They are part of the eternal, unchanging word of Allah, and just as relevant or subjective as anything else in the Quran.  

Quran (48:29) - "Muhammad is the messenger of Allah. And those with him are hard (ruthless) against the disbelievers and merciful among themselves"  Islam is not about treating everyone equally.Quran (2:216) - "Fighting is prescribed for you, and ye dislike it. But it is possible that ye dislike a thing which is good for you, and that ye love a thing which is bad for you. But Allah knoweth, and ye know not."Quran (2:191-193) - "And kill them wherever you find them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out. And Al-Fitnah [disbelief] is worse than killing...but if they desist, then lo! Allah is forgiving and merciful.   And fight them until there is no more Fitnah [disbelief and worshipping of others along with Allah] and worship is for Allah alone.  But if they cease, let there be no transgression except against Az-Zalimun (the polytheists, and wrong-doers, etc.)"  

I'm inexpert but have read the Quran through once slowly and a second time skimming looking for parallels with the Old and New Testaments, which I've also read several times.

Drudge Juxtaposes "Fat Man Christie" with UK "Pound for Pound" Weight Loss Program.

Tongue in cheek.  The picture of the NJ Governor appears to go with the weight loss story.