It looks like the Chilcot Inquiry might uncover information that Americans cannot access through their own government.
Britain’s former ambassador to the U.S., Christopher Meyer, told the inquiry that Bush and Blair used a meeting that April at Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, to “sign in blood” an agreement to take military action in Iraq.
Predictably the Blair camp defended itself weakly
However, in his testimony, Blair’s former chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, denied any agreement had been made and called Meyer’s account unreliable.
No doubt it will only confirm just how pro-moslem, pinko socialised that the UK has become recently to those on the right. Strange how the truth has a liberal bias.
Criminal charges are not the only way to make these cowards pay for their lack of care and honesty. A civil case by affected Americans against the Chickenhawk liars in their country via a class action lawsuit could rely on this evidence in its findings.
Some research has been released saying that two or more pops a week will increase the likelihood of developing pancreatic cancer in those that do develop it. The pancreas produces hormones and enzymes and one of these substances is insulin. Insulin production is raised enormously when a lot of sugar enters the blood stream. Pop contains a crap load of sugar and the addition of this overload to the regular spikes that occur in our insulin production due to the rubbish we ingest causes the pancreas to work harder than necessary. This allows the pancreas more opportunity to fail at a critical point and thus diabetes becomes an issue. The increased possibility of mutation by replacement cells and cancer occurring also appears to have stepped up.
The industry has spoken back about flaws in the study and cite its size as a real issue. 140 cases of pancreatic cancer does seem small. I reckon that they could have a point there.
Except this new study is not alone. Laurence N. Kolonel, MD, PhD, a researcher at the Cancer Research Center and professor of public health at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu has found,
… a positive association between high intake of fructose and pancreatic cancer,
and as,
… high-fructose corn syrup is the main sweetener in non-diet soft drinks, our findings and those of the present study are quite consistent.
Looks like that damn elitist science is getting in the way of Coca Cola killing folk at home with it’s product as well as in Columbia where it appears to farm out that job to paramilitary forces.
In any other sphere of Canadian life if anybody else acted this way the wingnuts would be crying treason etc. But even though the Americans have never stood by any free trade agreement when it was not immediately beneficial to them, our glorious leader gives them what they would never give to us.
None of this is new. Canada invariably comes off badly in free trade talks with its bigger, southern neighbour. The original 1989 Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement was designed in large part to ensure that Canadian softwood lumber manufacturers had guaranteed access to U.S. markets.
They never got that access. Seventeen years later, Ottawa finally admitted that they never would. We shall see whether Friday’s deal is more successful.
Why does this idiot hate his country so much that he cannot even be looked upon to protect its interests even minimally?
At Raphs place you will find an amazing pronouncement:
If Semrau Found Guilty, It Will Be Without Evidence
Raph then goes on to mention a lot of actions that the Canadian Military took to create a case for prosecuting one of its own for murder.
This trial went forward after Canadian soldiers gave witness statements to the Canadian Military Police, which went to the Canadian Forces’ judge advocate general.
Looks like a process of collecting evidence in the investigation of a crime to me. Raph then went on to pronounce that the only evidence that mattered was the body, because you couldn’t determine the cause of death with out it. (Witnesses seeing the officer pump two rounds into the still living fighter apparently don’t count.) Raph’s source for this amazing legal insight was a journo, who stated in his rationale for arriving at this conclusion:
As someone who watches far too many Crime Scene Investigation shows, I offer my own layperson’s legal opinion that, without a body, it’s pretty difficult to follow the evidence.
Wow aint that precious? Our legal beagle was trained by a CBC mini-series.
That should have set off alarm bells in someone who gets published in a national daily newspaper, but it didn’t. No Raph picked up the “show me the body ” ball and ran with it. There is precedent all over the world for murder convictions where the body has not been produced. Hell there wouldn’t be as many mafia hitmen in jail if you needed a body to convict.
Raph then says that this is a set-up job to send a message and throws Khadr and misinformed media reports into the mix just to see if anything can stick. (I also notice he has deleted his slur against military trials.)
What I find extremely disingenuous is the attempt by the National Post and Raph to call the process of Courts Marshal into question for this specific case. It’s not like the whole process is unusual or that the motions by the defence are in any way soundly based. And it’s not like the complaints were leveled by lefty, pinko scum. Battle tested soldiers were interviewed.
It appears that the right wing in Canada have moved on from their Jack Bauer “24 torture” fantasies and have entered into “the double tap to the head was a mercy killing really,” new macho alternative meme.
Who’d of thought that those on Canada’s right wing are in support of “euthanasia” for those who are in unbearable agony and are going to die soon anyway. I’m pretty sure that your religious commissars will be sending you some re-education opportunities very soon.
Double standards is a wingnut staple but does it have to be so obvious at every level?
I was struck by the words of Barry Kay at about 8:39 where he predicted that the offence any right minded Canadian has taken over the prorogation of Parliament will soon die once they get back to work in March. My view is that this prediction might have been more likely when the MSM were the main players in information dissemination. But today there are facebook groups, blogs and independent media outlets that I believe will ratchet up the tempo on our miserable political representatives.
I also believe that the public really resents the the way that our brave fighting forces and some brave civil servants have been treated by the cowards who command their actions. Bullying folk who are doing their jobs to the best of their abilities and using our fighting folk as a shield for political and command level dishonesty stinks to high heavens. When you get back to work and stop sponging off the tax payer, Harper, we will be waiting and we will want to find out what really happened with regard to your inadequacies and Hillier that goes for you and the others in your command too. Because the old days of the 48 hour news cycle are gone and the new information peddlers don’t forget.
Just reading my blogs and Ben Goldacre from Bad Science writes that the perpetrator of the MMR vaccination – Autism link has some serious explaining to do about his conduct in that affair. This is not surprising.
But reading further into the article I came across a link to a recent paper by the the Economic and Social Research Council (UK) about the information link between science, the media and the public. This certainly is an eye opener and shows why asking folk what their views are on complex topics is not a worthwhile exercise. An uninformed opinion is only made better if you consider a grossly uninformed opinion alongside it.
The inverted snobs of the world will no doubt categorise this as an example of anti-democratic elitism; but there is something to be said for informing yourself before you vote for change, and remembering that not all information is created equal. The Wakefield case mentioned at the the top of this page is a prime example.
Just like the MMR/Autism hysterics, the climate change deniers will never give any credence to any information that runs counter to their viewpoint and can always fall back on humourous anecdotes or ratchet up the rhetoric to appeal to the uninformed.
You’ve heard them all. Either it’s, “wow we could do with more al fresco lunches in March,” or it’s ” if the planet is so cold in winter how can there be global warming?”
The deniers love having their cake and eating it, the above link is a prime example of this. But if you try and show something like this:
Listen to the wails of, “conspiracy”, “fraud,” “lies”….. etc. For as long as a Fox News commentator, a gotcha moment with a foolish UN official and the opinions of a few scientists (most of whom know as much as me about climatology) will be said to equal the hard evidence of the vast majority of those in the field by the unscrupulous, then confusion will reign.
To be honest Raphael is an opinion blogger and is paid to create chatter, but the effects of this kind of disinformation with no concern for reality can be far reaching as the UK research shows.
Ms Kay is a columnist for the National Post. She appears to dislike feminism and those who try and improve the lot of women in society. Her most obvious tactic in this regard is to take the theoretical opinions of the most radical of feminists and attribute those viewpoints to the equality movement as a whole. A good example is the latest piece published in the Post to serve the men she wishes to impress. She appears to use the views of a person most folk have never heard of and condemn an entire sex to having the same view. Standard fare for Ms Kay. However a new side of Babs appears to have crept out from under the rock that was securing it.
Back in the 1980s when I attended football (soccer) matches around the UK a popular chant in English grounds against Liverpool supporters was:
“I’d rather be a Paki, than a Scouse!”
Scouse is a nickname for those who live on Merseyside.
This statement assumes that the listener has an existing low opinion of Pakistanis so that they will be stung by the preference of the singers. It also indicates that the chanter has an existing level of racial hatred too.
Now Ms Kay has continued the spat between her and a Star columnist with another post that has been published on a right wing blog. This post contains the following section:
As for the Toronto Star, I have a friend who teaches newcomers English and she only uses the Toronto Star as a teaching tool because, as she put it, “the writing is so simple and easy for immigrants to read.”
She could have used the phrase
“the writing is so simple and easy for her students to read.”
But no Babs decided to use another word. Everyone on the right knows immigration is bad so using immigrant will play on those existing hatreds and illustrate just how bad the Star is and as a bonus how lefty it is too. Just like the racist chanters at the soccer grounds in the 80s, Babs was using accepted code built around accepted prejudices to pander to the haters that form her target audience.
For somebody who chided her opponent in her posting thus:
My comments about Antonia’s writing are absolutely correct and I stand by them. She is an extremely banal writer – I should know – I edited a writing competition for high school students for 25 years, and I promise you the Grade 9 students who made the cut for the finished anthology all wrote much better than Antonia. So you can imagine my pique when I saw that AZ considered her writing similar to mine.
I can only assume that Ms Kay is aware of the content of her post, creates content with absolute care and intention and meant what she wrote. Otherwise the above quote is clearly grandstanding.
So Babs, from this immigrant to you, are you an erudite racist or are you just an ignorant hack?
