Ranting and Roaring

F1 brothel busted

Police have busted a brothel with a view of the Monaco grand prix. The yacht, in the Monte Carlo harbour last weekend, featured twenty five prostitutes who lured F1 spectators on board for $500 an hour, Britain’s ‘Mirror’ said.

Some windows had ‘good views of the street racetrack,’ the media report continued to explain. The 120ft yacht was impounded after the raid.

Yellowknife resident Don Babey, who claims to speak for the so-called “OutNorth” group, compares gays to “physical ailments, such as heart disease and strokes“.

• (I predict) Jacques Villeneuve drove himself out of a job today by taking himself and his teammate Massa out of the points with a poor overtaking maneuver.
• Red Bull’s stormtrooper helments for the pit crews was really cool
• The F1 director has no eye for action, having skipped the 4 cars bunched within a second of each other for 4th to 8th place to cover (race winner) Kimi Raikkonen drive around the track by himself
• The technical quality of F1 coverage sucks. Sound and video are constantly cutting out
• Having DSQed driver Jenson Button in the booth doing commentary was very cool.

Paul Anka covers The Cure’s Love Cats. Better than the original.

Jay and I are on the same page these. I’ve been saying almost exactly what he says here:

For a long time I have thought it would be best for Quebec to just go. Have a referendum on a clear question without the feds violating Quebec election laws and, if the soverigntists win (which they almost certainly will), go.

I have some time for the arguments that Northern Quebec and the Island of Montreal should hold concurrent referendums on whether or not to remain in Canada. But not enough to go to war over it. Let’s face it, anglo Montreal has been hollowing out for years and the majority of non-francophones left are actually immigrants and allophones. And I’m afraid that I have not the slightest interest in going to war with my many French Canadian friends to try and steal the hydropower which they built in Norther Quebec. (I would feel quite differently if the Cree had built it; but they didn’t and they are welcome to the several gazillion square miles of muskeg which surround the hydro installations.)

That said, what would change with a “Oui” vote? Not much. Quebec would be able to negotiate its way into NAFTA, it would no longer have to deal with nosy feds pushing one size fits all health and education policy. It already has its own pension plan, collects its own taxes and has its own police force. It even has its own foreign policy establishment.

So what changes?

Essentially, Ontario becomes even more oversized than it is now. And much richer as it will no longer have the economic drag of transfer payments and Bombardier style sweetheart deals to finance.

Alberta and BC become richer and even the Maritimes are better off because what equalization there is will go to provinces with much smaller populations.

Quebec will be free to pursue her destiny as she sees fit. And Quebec may be richer as she will no longer be on the receiving end of the transactions of decline embodied in transfer payments which have lef her with an underdeveloped industrial, service and high tech economy. It will be tough for a few years but it will get better as the Quebecois find their feet as a nation.

A few notes:

• There will be losers: SK and MB. Sorry folks, I don’t see the point: railroads don’t need that many places to stop and grain can easily and efficiently be grown. And QC: within a century French in North America will be a funny English accent.
• Atlantic Canada will out-migrate several hundred thousand people as tranfers (through all sources) are massively reduced. They’ve reduced proud peoples into dependents. Sorry, it doesn’t really work for anyone.I was part of the near-100K that left during the 90′s from Newfoundland; I’m still back there 4 to 6 weeks a year.
• The QC referendum won’t be fair or clear, but the PQ will use it as an excuse to go anyway. Are you willing to go there and shoot people to stop them from doing so? I didn’t think so.
• France will recognize an independent Quebec government within 90 minutes of the independence declaration.
• QC will take all of the province (but not Labrador) with them. See my previous points about killing people.

If you’re getting the news from CBC, you may have missed some of the more important points from the Gurmant Grewal story. Andrew Coyne has the full story but here’s the highlights:

• Tim Murphy, from the PMO wants Gurmant Grewal and his wife Nina Grewal to sit out the confidence/budget vote
• For doing this, Grewal would get future considerations. Grewal takes this to mean a senate seat or an ambassadorship, but this apparently isn’t spelled out on the tape
• Tim Murphy quote: ”If that proposal is of some interest to you, then I will talk to [Liberal and Minister of Citizenship and Immigration and KKK-expert Joe] Volpe and get something to happen” (via Paul Wells)
• Joe Volpe recently and publically sent the RCMP after Grewal.

In a normal country, we’d be starting the criminal investigations now; in Canada, the RCMP is at the beck and call of the Liberal party, the “independent” judiciary has been appointed by the Liberal party… many seemingly for services rendered, the media has neutered by golden chains or is simply openly partisan, and most of the population think Brian Mulrooney used to do that anyway, didn’t he?

Addendum 1:

“He approached us. He approached us because he wanted to cross the floor,” said [Liberal penis Ujjal] Dosanjh, adding that Gurmant Grewal came back several times when the Liberals rejected his initial demands.
“I am actually offended that he wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

I feel like vomitting.

Addendum 2:

Here’s a highlight from the tape apparently recorded with a home made toilet paper roll microphone.

Parliament, which we elected, has told the Prime Minister, who we didn’t, that it no longer has confidence in his government. The Prime Minister’s response? I’ll be the arbiter of Parliament says, not Parliament.

Welcome to the other side of the limits of parliamentary democracies. Population: you.

I’m really trying to not be a whiner about press bias but this Associated Press article “Jolie Urges Aid for Afghan Refugees“, full of backgrounders and asides, is truly remarkable for what it doesn’t mention: the 2001 US invasion of that country.

Since the fall of the hardline Taliban regime in late 2001, an estimated 2.3 million Afghans have gone back to their country under a UN-supported repatriation program — often returning to a life of dire poverty.

[...] The flight of Afghan refugees to Pakistan — and Iran — began with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and continued in the 1990s during a bloody civil war, the fundamentalist rule of the Taliban and years of drought.

Man, you can’t make this stuff up:

Ever the masters of punctilious regulation, the European Union’s 25 Commissioner have outdone themselves with a code of conduct for their new and beautifully-appointed Brussels sauna.

A 10-point code sent to Peter Mandelson and his colleagues advises them on etiquette in the mixed facility, which opened last week. Nudity is de rigueur, according to the commission’s infrastructure office, but bravado is not.

“Reckless competition about who stands heat best is out of the question. Leave your clothes in the dressing room – nakedness is natural,” the code tells its 18 male and seven female commissioners. “Sweating makes swimsuits uncomfortable.” The list of dos and don’ts is comprehensive. Commissioners in the sauna, installed in the EU’s recently renovated Berlaymont headquarters in Brussels, are advised to take their time, allowing “at least an hour and a half” for each session.

I work at all the wrong places. It continues, probably for the benefit of French members:

Showers are required beforehand “to moisten the skin and remove any possible body or fragrant odours” and they are reminded to dry themselves with a towel afterwards.

And no Marxism in Europe:

The VIP sauna, which operates five days a week and at weekends on special request, is only for commissioners, heads of cabinet and special guests. A separate sauna for the rest of the commission’s staff will offer all-male and all-female sessions, with mixed session on Fridays.

Book me in for Fridays, please. Then again, maybe not.

The saunas, with taxpayer-funded showers and whisks, have their critics. “It would seem that the commission needs instructions in even the simplest things in life,” said Christopher Heaton-Harris, a Conservative MEP.

“Not many offices have saunas for their top executives even in the companies that perform well. The commissioners are just pampering themselves.”

The commission moved back into the star-shaped building last year after being forced to leave in 1991 while asbestos was removed from the structure. The renovation overran by many years, and went tens of millions of euros over budget.

Oh bullshit, Al.

Marx’s ideas were the same as the rest of the garbage of history: if inferiors follow orders and allow themselves to be remade in the image of their superiors, everything will be OK. His economic theories were garbage, of as much use to humanity as were Adolf Hilter’s theories on racial relationships.

Marx’s principles were never co-opted by murderous tyrants, they were simply applied by them. You’d find few, if any, Marxists over the last 90 years who would have preferred America’s economic and political system [despite all the benefits you list] to that of the Soviet Union’s or China’s yet you’d find 10,000 workers looking to migrate to the US for a single one looking to go the other way.

All the items you list exist in free democracies following the traditions of the western enlightenment, if not American revolutionary ideals (even if the monopoly board caricatures of the 1920s wouldn’t agree). Freedom of association give workers the right to assemble and strike, democracy the right to collectively decide what we should pay for as a group, property rights and capitalism create the wealth needed to sustainably make it happen. And the further you move a society away from those rights, the less likely it is that workers will enjoy the benefits of “socialism”.

If you see a Marxist today, laugh in his face and tell ‘em, “get a job, hippy“.

PS. who is that you’re speaking about that’s going to set back labour laws one hundred years? Would it be a certain PM aspirant, who’s secret agenda is revealed now to be child labour camps?