Michael Ignatieff certainly wants to offer himself as a clear alternative to Stephen Harper, with Canada offered fully supine to our betters:

Liberal leadership contender Michael Ignatieff blasted Stephen Harper Thursday, criticizing the prime minister for engaging in "megaphone diplomacy" on his foreign policy stance toward China

"Mr. Harper, I think, believes you can go to one of the greatest civilizations on earth, a superpower of the 21st century and give them a little lecture on human rights," Ignatieff told CBC News.

[...]  Ignatieff said the best way for Canada to raise those concerns is to get in a room with the Chinese president and say "here are the files, here are the issues where we have specific disagreements with you; how can we work to get these things resolved?"

[...] "But the right way to do that is to lower the megaphone, lower the volume, get into rooms, stand up for our values quietly."

Sad. If Canada was only 10,000 people living in sod huts, I'd still consider ourselves a superior civilization to one that chops up its citizens to sell for spare parts. I'm not a progressive though.

Loyala Hearn gives credit to Danny Williams for breaking up Paul and Heather, poor dears:

Hearn said it all started with McCartney's famous appearance last spring on the "Larry King Live" CNN show. McCartney, an animal rights activist, was debating Williams, the Newfoundland and Labrador premier, on the merits of the seal hunt.

Hearn said McCartney showed respect for the points Williams made in defence of the hunt, but his wife - apparently a more zealous anti-sealing activist - was "not so gracious."

McCartney saw a different woman that night, Hearn said, and that may have changed his view of her.

"And we'll take some credit for that," he joked.

I heard William's appearance on Larry King and I think it's a shame that he didn't take the opportunity to tell Mills that as a person of no accomplishment (except living of someone else's decades old work), she should really take the opportunity to keep her mouth shut about telling hard working people to go on welfare.

BTW: Mills is claiming Paul used to beat her senseless, or something.

Gheorghe Lucian is flown around the world to confront rich, privileged environmentalists who try to keep the poor down, improvished and no doubtedly, quaint. The Telegraph reports:

An unemployed Romanian miner who is flown across the globe to confront environmental activists is the unlikely star of a Michael Moore-style film, aimed at debunking the militant green movement.

Gheorghe Lucian, 23, is a plain-speaking resident of an impoverished village where an opencast gold mine is planned.

He is dismayed that the project, which would bring a £400 million investment and generate 600 jobs in an area where unemployment is 70 per cent, is being blocked by environmentalists.

[...] The official admitted that residents of Fort Dauphin, where environmentalists are objecting to a mine, were "economically disadvantaged" and many had no jobs. But he insisted: "I could put you with a family and you count how many times in a day that family smiles, if you could measure stress. Then I put you with a family well off, or in New York or London, and you count how many times people smile and measure stress… Then you tell me who is rich and who is poor."

Using a style reminiscent of Michael Moore, whose film Fahrenheit 9/11 lampooned the Bush administration, Mr McAleer lured environmentalists into making statements that were false or patently ridiculous.

During the hour-long film, Françoise Heidebroek, a Belgian opponent of the Rosia Montana mine, says Romanian villagers prefer to use horses rather than cars, and to rely on "traditional cattle raising, small agriculture, wood processing" to live.

Locals retort that their land is too poor for farming, that they all want cars and that they are desperate for the investment the mine would bring. The film had its first screening last week at a conference of gold-mining companies in Denver, Colorado. Alan Hill, president of Gabriel Resources, which did not control the film's content, said: "Before, the environmentalists would lob mortars at us and we would keep our heads down. Now, there is a big push back."

Weirdly, I'm reminded of Drew Barrymore bragging about having had taken a dump in the woods. If you were to visit her house today, I somehow doubt you'll find a little squat out back in the dirt where she does her business.

Jamming carrot sticks and other unpalatable crap down kids mouths in England doesn't seem to be working:

"I don't buy any of the stuff in the canteen, it's disgusting,' she says. "The drinks are vile - there's no sugar in them. And as for the food, well, it's all salads and vegetables and stuff - and I don't like that.

"So I stock up before school on crisps and lollipops and chews, then at lunchtime I go and eat them where none of them nosy teachers is looking."

Joanne's friends laugh and agree. They say that since the school got 'sick-bag food', they never go to the canteen. They much prefer to munch their sticky, fatty snacks in secret where no 'health police' can find them.

It's not quite what the Government intended when it set up the healthy food initiative.

Now I understand the difference:

• Class 1 Accident: "Freak": Being blown up by your allies
• Class 2 Accident: "Bizzare": Stingray stinger through the heart

I wholely endorse ESR's plea re: dear Americans, we're on the same side (mostly) please stop killing us.

CBC/AP reports:

A plane caught fire while landing in northeastern Iran on Friday, killing as many as 80 people on board, said state television.

Roughly 60 people are reported to have survived the crash, which happened at an airport in the city of Mashad.

Reports suggest the Russian-made Tupolev TU-154 blew a tire while landing and caught fire.

The Iran Airtour flight had been travelling from the southern city of Bandar Abbas to Mashad, with 147 people on board. It's not clear how many crew members were on board, but none died in the fire, state TV said.

Initial reports said there were 60 dead, but the death toll later rose to 80.

While air crashes are infrequent in Iran, U.S. sanctions against the country have prevented Iran's airlines from receiving new aircraft parts to repair their fleets.

So "US sanctions" are responsible for "Russian-made" planes crashing now? Am I missing something?

Update: Damian Penny notices the same thing issue with Reuters reporting, although at least they work in the "Russian planes are pieces of sh*t" part. Why doesn't Iran build it's own planes? They can build nukes apparently; it can't be too hard to figure out how the build planes -- we've been doing it for 100-odd years. 

When Speaking Truth To Power, the preferred mode is lecture, not dialogue (þ Tim Blair).

CNN reports:

Kazakhstan’s Foreign Ministry threatened legal action Monday against a British comedian who wins laughs by portraying the central Asian state as a country populated by drunks who enjoy cow-punching as a sport.

…

[Comedian “Ali G” Sacha Baron] Cohen appears to have drawn official Kazakh ire after he hosted the annual MTV Europe Music Awards show in Lisbon earlier this month as Borat, who arrived in an Air Kazakh propeller plane controlled by a one-eyed pilot clutching a vodka bottle.

Here’s the best part: the Jooooos (collectively) are behind it all:

“We do not rule out that Mr. Cohen is serving someone’s political order designed to present Kazakhstan and its people in a derogatory way,” Kazakh Foreign Ministry spokesman Yerzhan Ashykbayev told a news briefing.

The Vienna Metroblog posts some interesting pictures from a local plumber. I still think “man with the lightbulb jammed up his ass” (originally posted here) tops it.

The French and the Dutch recently had referenda on adopting the EU constitution. In both countries the “no” side posted decisive victories. Now Denmark is reconsidering having a referendum at all. My first though was that they’ll just ratify the EU in parliament to get the answer they want. But after reading the BBC article, well, I have no idea what they’re planning:

“We want clarity that it is this treaty, nothing more or less, on which we will vote on 27 September, and if there is no clarity on that, because various processes are started which in principle could change it, then you cannot hold a vote.”

If you can make sense of that, leave a note in the comments.

The Guardian reports:

France’s new prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, refused yesterday to push the country down the road towards free-market reform, saying “Gallic genius” would help put back on its feet a “suffering, impatient and angry” nation that has failed to adapt fully to a changing world.

In a speech to the packed lower house of the national assembly, Mr Villepin said his top aim was to cut the country’s stubborn 10%-plus unemployment rate and announced €4.5bn (£3bn) of extra money to achieve it.

But he insisted that an increasingly heated public debate about the shortcomings of France’s high-tax, high-protection social model compared with the more liberal Anglo-Saxon system was irrelevant.

“In a modern democracy, the debate is not between the liberal and the social, it is between immobilism and action,” he said. “Solidarity and initiative, protection and daring: that is the French genius.”

This isn’t one of those “pick on the French” blog posts, it’s just about the commonplace emptiness of that last sentence. Unemployment, inflation, deflation, Africa, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, teenage hoods, vandalism, cars with the bumpers hanging off, etc.: no one’s not saying we should do something. The question is: what? That’s the hard part, not the “when we figure it out we should do it élan and style”.

(þ Simberg)

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.

Man, this is new pope is soooo cool. As has been noted around the blogosphere, he's gotta be good because he's pissing off all the right people. My favorite reaction has to be Andrew Sullivan's, who was apparently hoping for Pope Kumbaya I who'd be totally groovy with strap-on lesbian couples as long as they did in a loving Christian environment.

So anyway, what's this all about:

For American Catholics, I foresee an accelerating exodus.

This is the kind of context-free tripe that passes for analysis among columists that's really starting to piss me off. Why are they going to leave? It seems to me that the most successful religions are the ones that are strict, that claim to speak for something eternal, not the ones pushing flavour of the week beliefs (Rowan Williamson, I'm looking at you)

And in case you haven't noticed, Catholics the world around have been quite capable of adjusting official Church theology to the needs of their personal lives. How many Catholic families do you see running around with 16 kids these days anyway?

Ah, Vienna. Sigh. God knows how many Egg + Potato Omelets I had at the Kleines Cafe when I was there.

link and link.

With all these points, excepting #3 upon which I neither have an opinion nor am I qualified to have one. With regards to #1, double ditto to the liberal Chinese point; I posit that China will lose when they try it. My liberal Chinese friends, often quoting their local papers, believe that Americans are mentally weak and materially overstretched — that is, they don't have the guts or the wherewithal for a fight; this is the same bet numerous nations have made and lost in the last two and change centuries.

I'm going to break my "no explicit profanity" rule on this blog to bring you this announcement: the fucking Swiss are so fucking fucked it's not fucking funny.

CNN reports that Fossett presses on despite fuel problem - Mar 3, 2005. Fossett is quoted:

"Let's go for it."

Man, if he doesn't make those are going to be really cool last words.

It looks like Matt Good's been released on a day pass but he's still not taking his meds. He has a number of lovely shots from his travels around Europe ... I have matching photos I took back in 2002 from Vienna, Budapest and Milan. The idiot took a cab from the Milan airport to Milan itself, which is about one zillion kilometers away. Doesn't he know that modern Italy was laid out by statists?

Here's my take on Budapest and Milan.

Anyhoo, feeling an expansive sense of benovolence today, I'll have to claim that somewhere deep down I suspect many leftists are salvageable. For example, look at this quote:

It’s fascinating to me to be in what was once an Eastern Block country. You can definitely feel the long, cold shadow of the former USSR here. So the question is - is life better now that Burger King is every three blocks?

Now, what does that offensive piece of nastiness have to do with anything? Because you know that he knows what a retarded question it is because he had the good sense not to ask that of anyone in Budapest. Otherwise we'd be looking at photographs of his hospital rooms and reading that his orthodontic bills are an affront to social justice.

For those interested in the geographical ins and outs of Budapest, there isn't a Burger King every three blocks, unless you thing Budapest is a six by six block. There's a lot of McDonald's though — what a nightmare!

I don't even need to read this one, the title is so good "Note to PM: The Chinese do not have any rights". Rights, the judiciary, the rule of law are not even cargo cult emulations; they're meant to sooth us, not bring a benefit to them,

How would we manage without experts? Probably a lot better...

Tens of millions of people can be saved and more than 500 million people can escape poverty if rich countries keep their word to increase development aid to the world's poorest countries, a United Nations-sponsored report said Monday.

"We have the opportunity in the coming decade to cut world poverty by half," the 3,000-page report said.

Jeez, couldn't they even couldn't cut the report in half. 3000 pages? What are these people, paid by the word?

Written by 265 experts, the report, entitled Investing in Development, says countries must double annual aid to $135 billion US in 2006, rising to $195 billion US by 2015.

The report says rich countries should have no problem doling out the funds. Such aid "pales beside the wealth of high income countries – and the world's military budget of $900 billion a year," according to the report.

Yes, "doling" is the right word. We doll out, what, $40,000 per native family in Canada and they continue live in abject poverty. Do the "experts" have an explanation why putting sub-Saharan Africa on the dole will make them anything but dependent losers?

At the Millennium Summit in 2000, world leaders set goals to fight poverty and hunger by 2015. Those goals included halving the number of people living on a dollar a day, achieving universal primary education, and halting and reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS and malaria.

How about promoting the use of DDT in third-world countries to combat malaria? And here's an even better idea: how about letting Africa, Central America, South America and so forth have a fair shot at our agricultural markets? That's something you won't see in a report as long as even one of your 265 "experts" are European.

[...] The U.S spends about 0.15 per cent of its GDP on development aid. Canada contributes about $3 billion Cdn a year to foreign aid, amounting to 0.3 per cent of the GDP.

I'm asuming this doesn't include private donations, military-related aid and remittances. I.e. our governments are undercontributing to the UN's favorite NGOs.