The Mound of Sound

Legendary Johnny Carson sidekick and infomercial pitchman Ed McMahon is on the verge of getting booted out of his home.

Question. How does a guy at 85 still owe almost $5-million on his mortgage?

In any case McMahon has fallen into default on the $4.8-million he owes the mortgage company and is desperately trying to flog the property. A spokesman said Ed broke his neck 18-months ago and hasn’t been able to work since, leaving him without an income to service the mortgage debt.

Okay, but. McMahon recently bagged a $7.2-million win against his insurance company for a claim that his house developed mold which led to the death of his dog Muffin and sickened Ed and Mrs. McMahon. Okay, $7.2-million minus $4.8 million ought to leave you with clear title to your $6.5 million dollar home and a tidy $2.4-million in spending money left over. Maybe it’s not the Publishers Clearinghouse grand prize but it’s still pretty decent.

I don’t use the internet to download music or movies. I prefer to own the CD or DVD and keep it in my own collection but, then again, I pick and choose and can afford what I buy. So much for me.

What of those who do download and participate in file-sharing services? According to the National Spot, the Harperites are moving to stomp on them with both boots. It seems the government’s updates to the Copyright Act will introduce a fine of $500 for each and every illegal file transferred online. 500 bucks a pop – if you’re caught or if someone in the ranks of Harper’s faceless political commissars wants you or your kid caught.

Get this. Those Reformatory stiffs are also going to make it illegal to “unlock” your cell phone! If you bought it from Rogers or Telus or Fido, so long as you have that phone you’re a slave to Rogers or Telus or Fido. Get real. There are plenty of reasons to unlock a cell phone. If you’re travelling abroad an unlocked phone lets you buy a local SIM card and take the benefit of local, long-distance rates instead of the usurious roaming charges Canadian cellular companies levy.

Here’s a question. I just bought a cell phone on ebay and it’s already unlocked. Is that going to make me some sort of outlaw when I go shopping for a Canadian carrier or if I decide to later switch? By the way, if you’re looking for a cell phone do check ebay because you can often get one for a small fraction of the best price you’ll get from a Canadian cellular provider even with a longterm plan.

There’s yet another damned good reason to get rid of Harper and his punks. Harper may be content to bend over for the cellular providers so long as he gets a reacharound out of it but there’s no reason the rest of us should tolerate their little lovefest.

It’s possible to extract a form of ersatz oil out of coal. It’s an old technique but one that’s fallen out of favour due to the large amounts of greenhouse gases created in the production process.

China’s willingness to trash the global environment is a question of deeds, not words. The Chinese talk a good game but they’re launching a major CTL, or coal-to-liquid, plant in Inner Mongolia.

The first plant will only produce about 20,000 barrels of oil a day, a drop in the bucket compared to China’s 7.2 million barrel a day consumption. To reach this level of production, China will process 3.5 million tonnes of coal per year into 1 million tonnes of oil products such as diesel for cars.

But wait, there’s more.

China is targeting on transforming half of Mongolia’s coal production into oil by 2010. That would involve processing 135-million tonnes of coal per year.

And China may soon be joined by the United States which is believed to have the largest reserves of coal in the world. From ENN:

Think the supposedly green yet lobbyist plagued John McCain will shut this down? Think again.

We’re once again embroiled in the thorny issue of providing sanctuary to American servicemen and women who don’t want to serve in the endless US war in Iraq.

The logic used by Citizenship and Immigration spokesperson Danielle Norris is that those seeking sanctuary now cannot be compared to the kids we took in during Vietnam. “Those coming to Canada now volunteered for military service.”

Yes, they are different but it’s a fragile distinction. During Vietnam the US government wasn’t able to deceive enough young people to fill its army with volunteers. Instead it had to rely on the draft, conscription. Young people were forced, often against their will, to serve and fight and die abroad.

Contrast that with Iraq. Here the US government was able to deceive enough young people to fill its army with volunteers. But it hasn’t been able to deceive enough young people to keep that scam going. It can’t find volunteers, and doesn’t have the courage to re institute the draft, so its cowardly way out is to resort to impressment of those who they snagged at the outset, including a lot of reservists, and transform them into a “Stop Loss” hostage army that keeps getting sent back to fight a war, 15-months at a stretch, for three or four or even five tours – and we’re still counting.

These poor buggers weren’t drafted in to the US armed forces but they’ve surely been drafted when their enlistments were up and they expected to be going home to their families and jobs. If you’re looking for distinctions, here’s the most important one. Today’s hostage soldiers are drafted forever, until America finally tires of losing in Iraq. Forty years ago, draftees were only required to fight for one year before being released.

So, the Harper government’s rationale is that these people were dumb enough to believe they were signing on for just a couple of years and got tricked and that’s their problem. As far as we’re concerned, they’re entitled to all the rights and freedoms of a Roman legionnaire which were pretty much to keep fighting until you were dead.

No, the Harper government hasn’t got the spine to do the right thing even if it has the approval of Parliament. After all we just signed up our own soldiers to carry on America’s mismanaged war in Afghanistan until 2011.

Hillary enjoyed the support of rank bigots of both genders but it was the depth of bigotry among women that took me by surprise. Now I’m not naive. I studied in the states and I’ve seen, first hand, more than enough racism among American women. What troubles me is how the feminist leaders didn’t step forward to denounce this sort of thing during the nomination campaign. Certainly they ought to have been fighting misogyny but also speaking out against the tide of racism that surfaced from their own gender. Instead they sat on their hands.

Genuine feminism cannot tolerate racism. So, what happened?

The primaries are over and Obama has taken the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. He came from behind and bested not only the shoo-in favourite but also her popular ex-president husband.

So, where were we? Of course, Obama has won the delegates he needs to take the Democratic nomination so where is Hillary? Has she done what is demanded of any losing candidate and fallen behind Obama to support his fight against the Republicans? Of course not. This is a Clinton who believes that America’s imperial age continues and that, no matter the result of the primaries, the nomination is still hers because – well, because she’s a Clinton. How arrogant of that skinny little upstart to even run against her in the first place? Really.

The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd is unquestionably an Obama supporter and has been throughout. Notwithstanding that, her take on Billary in today’s paper is spot on:

“Whoever said that after denial comes acceptance hadn’t met the Clintons.
If Hillary could not have an acceptance speech, she wasn’t going to have acceptance.

“It’s never going to end,” sighed one Democrat who has been advising Hillary. “We’re just moving to a new phase.”

Barry has been trying to shake off Hillary and pivot for quite a long time now, but she has managed to keep her teeth in his ankle and raise serious doubts about his potency. Getting dragged across the finish line Tuesday night by Democrats who had had enough of the rapacious Clintons, who had decided, if it came to it, that they would rather lose with Obama than win with Hillary, the Illinois senator tried to celebrate at the St. Paul arena where Republicans will anoint John McCain in September.

…“What does Hillary want?” she mused, in her most self-aware moment in some time. “I will be making no decisions tonight,” she concluded, asking fans to go to her Web site to share their thoughts.

And, even though Democrats were no longer listening, Hillary’s camp radiated the message that Obama was a sucker who had played by the rules on Florida and Michigan, and then reached an appeasing compromise, and that such a weak sister could never handle Putin or I’m-A-Dinner-Jacket.

…Clintonologists know that Hillary is up to something, but they aren’t sure what. Theory No. 1 is that it’s the Cassandra “I told you so” gambit: She believes intensely that he’s too black, too weak and too elitist — with all his salmon and organic tea and steamed broccoli — to beat her pal John McCain. But she has to pretend she’ll do “whatever it takes,” even accept the vice presidency, a job she’s already had and doesn’t want again, so that nobody will blame her when he loses on Nov. 4. Then she can power on to 2012.

Theory No. 2 is that it’s a “Bad stuff happens” maneuver, exemplified in her gaffe about the R.F.K. assassination, that she figures that at least if she moves a few blocks from Embassy Row to the Naval Observatory, she’ll be a heartbeat away from the job she’s always wanted.

…For months, Hillary has been trying to emasculate Obama with the sort of words and themes she has chosen, stirring up feminist anger by promoting the idea that the men were unfairly taking it away from the women, and covering up her own campaign mistakes with cries of sexism. Even his ability to finally clinch the historic nomination did not stop her in that pursuit. She did not bat her eyelashes at him and proclaim him Rhett Butler instead of Ashley Wilkes.”

I don’t want to meddle, and congratulations by the way on cinching the Democratic nomination, but –

…but, when you’re looking for a running mate maybe, just maybe you might look to someone who hasn’t lately and repeatedly and quite openly mused on your hypothetical assassination a’la Bobby Kennedy.

You’ll spend your entire term glancing over your shoulder and you’ll have to constantly watch both of them. Why not do it the easy way? Just fill the tub, throw in the piranhas and jump in.

I sympathize with the American people for, while they’ve made some stupid mistakes these past eight years, I can’t think of a time in the last six decades when the population of a Western nation has been so overwhelmed by such a malevolent pack of liars in office.

Word of caution here. I am NOT suggesting the Bush regime is on some sort of par with the Hitler administration, not at all, nothing of the sort. That said, I don’t think that state propaganda has been brought to bear on a populace so powerfully and effectively as by the Bushies since Joseph Goebbels and, even then, he openly called himself a propagandist.

It’s easy for us to judge and heap scorn on the American people but when have we ever been subjected to such a subversive onslaught of deceit, fear mongering and hate mongering from our own government? We haven’t. Not to say there aren’t those north of the 49th who wouldn’t try but we haven’t experienced the traumatic underpinning the Americans suffered on 9/11 to let them get away with it.

They lied their way into wars without end. They lied about their tax cuts and the prosperity it would bring to all. They lied about the danger of environmentalism. It’s been one lie atop the next until lie has become indistinguishable from truth.

Now we learn – surprise, surprise – that political appointees (commissars) in NASA’s public affairs office, “worked to control and distort public accounts of its researchers’ findings about climate change for at least two years, the inspector general’s office said yesterday.”

From the Washington Post:

“James E. Hansen, who directs NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and has campaigned publicly for more stringent limits on greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming, told The Post and the New York Times in September 2006 that he had been censored by NASA press officers, and several other agency climate scientists reported similar experiences. NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are two of the government’s lead agencies on climate change issues.

From the fall of 2004 through 2006, the report said, NASA’s public affairs office “managed the topic of climate change in a manner that reduced, marginalized, or mischaracterized climate change science made available to the general public.” It noted elsewhere that “news releases in the areas of climate change suffered from inaccuracy, factual insufficiency, and scientific dilution.”

Lest we yield to the temptation to get smug about this, remember this is pretty much exactly what Harpo has done by gagging Environment Canada scientists and requiring their communications with the outside world to be subjected to his political commissar’s censorship from the PMO.

“Kristin Scuderi, a spokeswoman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said in an e-mail that director John H. Marburger III “would not comment until he’s reviewed the report, and he has not yet done so yet. Therefore, OSTP has no comment at this time.”

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), one of the senators who pressed for the investigation, said in a statement that the report showed that citizens had been denied access to critical scientific information that should inform public policy.

“Global warming is the most serious environmental threat we face – but this report is more evidence that the Bush Administration’s appointees have put political ideology ahead of science,” Lautenberg said. “Our government’s response to global warming must be based on science, and the Bush Administration’s manipulation of that information violates the public trust.”

I suppose it must be some comfort to the White House to know that, even if John McCain loses in November, there’ll still be an administration nearby to keep alive the Bush legacy of secrecy and deceit. That is until we send them packing and restore democracy to Canada.

I remember the day when we used to mock and ridicule the Soviet Union for just this sort of thing.