Are you a good person?

It’s a 4-seater smart car with room in the trunk for a large bag. It’s not bad looking - not good looking, but it could be worse. Now here’s the things, while the Smart Car goes for at least $15,000 - this one, the Tata Nano - goes for $2,500.

Save just $7.00 a day and you can have a nano in a year. *Less if you put it in that Indian ICICI Bank (which I’m thinking of doing - 4.25% interest) .

What this means, according to a Slate article, is that millions of the new Indian, Chinese and third world middle class will now be able to afford a car. While it gets pretty good milage, this means that their production of greenhouse gases is going to skyrocket

So, question, what’s better?

That third worlders get the car they’ve been wanting for decades and get to develop or that we not have the car, that we keep thier greenhouse gas emissions artificially low and that we save the earth.Or without the framing, What’s more important, people or the environment? If you’re a good person, I hope you’d say ‘people’ thing. However, if you’re a bad person … a posh environmentalist posseur…

The Battle of Dorking

It’s a real place. Dorking that is - south London, or at least south of London. It’s also the title of an alarmist book from 1871. I came accross it earlier today. It describes the fall of Britain to the Germans. The Germans of the Iron Chancellor, as opposed to the more familiar “scary” Germans of Herr Schicklgruber.

If you are of the alarmist bent (comme io) you’ll see a lot to like in the booklet. Here’s how it begins:

You ask me to tell you, my grandchildren, something about my own share in the great events that happened fifty years ago. ‘Tis sad work turning back to that bitter page in our history, but you may perhaps take profit in your new homes from the lesson it teaches. For us in England it came too late. And yet we had plenty of warnings, if we had only made use of them. The danger did not come on us unawares. It burst on us suddenly, ’tis true; but its coming was foreshadowed plainly enough to open our eyes, if we had not been wilfully blind. We English have only ourselves to blame for the humiliation which has been brought on the land.

You can download the whole book here. It’s a PDF, free download from my googlepages. Right click and ’save target as’.

Picture of the day

Downtown Vancouver street closed by windstorm.  Some stuff blew out of the new 60-storey Shangri-La tower and some windows blew out of the Terrasen or BC Hydro building.  But nothing like the dammage from the big storm last year.

I tried to take pictures, but it’s hard to take night shotsif you can’t stand still, and hard to stand still in 70kph winds.  This is one of the only pictures that worked out - showing a lot of the city blocked off.  Kind of boring actually, but the Shangri-la Tower was pretty cool, the wind blowing through the top floors sounded like hundreds of drums.  You could hear it all over downtown.

Huckabee congratulates Canada on preserving our national igloo

My girlfriend is American so I have absolutely no time for the “Americans are idiots” brand of Canadian nationalism.

I’d hate to perpetuate it, and I don’t want you to think that’s what I’m doing here. So please take this as a condemnation of a singular dumbass - Mike Huckabee.

Thanks to Terry Glavin for digging it up. Here is Arkansas Governor and potential Republican Presidential candidate / isolationist / creationist / pushy big government authoritarian Mike Huckabee congratualing Canada on preserving our national igloo [pictured top left] . Scroll to the end:

Canada’s Top 25 Political Blogs - January

Below you will find Canada’s Top 25 Political Blogs for January. These are ranked according to a combination of influence and web traffic. You can read the specifics of that here.

Before the listings, three things:

Single Issue Blogs. I’m getting bugged about single political issue blogs. I don’t think I should include them. I understand that blogs like Michael Geist’s are important and relevant and far better than one or two of the blogs on the list, but I still don’t think they fully meet the criteria of a “political” blog. For the record: If Mr. Geist’s blog were listed here, he would come in at number 2 with a PR of 6 and an Alexa rank of 205250.

Second - new BC Blogroll. If any of you are in BC and are Liberal or Tory bloggers, please let me know in the comments section of this post if you would like to be included on the BC Young Liberals Blog Aggregator. I’m in the process of finishing it up - but you can view it here: youngbloggers.ca .

Lastly, please do try and take some time to read Andy Olmsted’s final blog post if you haven’t already. If you don’t know, Mr. Olmsted was killed in Iraq 2 weeks ago. He wrote a humbling post to be published if he were killed:

Believe it or not, one of the things I will miss most is not being able to blog any longer. The ability to put my thoughts on (virtual) paper and put them where people can read and respond to them has been marvelous, even if most people who have read my writings haven’t agreed with them. If there is any hope for the long term success of democracy, it will be if people agree to listen to and try to understand their political opponents rather than simply seeking to crush them. While the blogosphere has its share of partisans, there are some awfully smart people making excellent arguments out there as well, and I know I have learned quite a bit since I began blogging.

Here are the rankings. If there’s something I left out - please let me know in the comments section.

Current Rank Site Google Page Rank Alexa Traffic Rank December Rank

1. Matthew Good | Google PR6 | Alexa 171766 | DR 1 |
2. Mark Steyn | Google PR6 | Alexa 196433 | DR 2|
3. Small Dead Animals | Google PR5 | Alexa 188865 | DR3 |
4. Le Blogue du Quebec | Google PR5 | Alexa: 205426 | DR4 |
5. Abandoned Stuff | Google PR5 | Alexa: 254405 | DR5 |
6. Daimnation | Google PR5 | Alexa: 447471| DR8 |
7. Five Feet of Fury | Google PR5 | 463763 | DR6 |
8. Canadian Cynic | Google PR5 | Alexa: 512692 | DR7 |
9. Angry in the Great White North | Google PR5 | Alexa: 514025 | DR9 |
10. Le Revue Gauche | Google PR5 | Alexa 572686 | DR11 |
11. Galloping Beaver | Google PR5 | Alexa: 614075 | DR12 |
12. Vive le Canada | Google PR5 | Alexa: 617874 | DR10 |
13. Gen X at 40 | Google PR5 | Alexa: 726901 | DR14 |
14. Stephen Taylor | Google PR5 | Alexa: 734954 | DR16 |
15. David Akin’s On the Hill | Google PR5 | Alexa: 763865 | DR17 |
16. Calgary Grit | Google PR5 | Alexa: 799536 | DR19 |
17. Andrew Coyne | Google PR5 | Alexa: 806708 | DR13 |
18. My Blahg | Google PR5 | Alexa: 875908 | DR20 |
19. Garth Turner Unedited | Google PR4 | Alexa: 449926 | DR21|
20. Proud to be Canadian | Google PR4 | Alexa: 505580 | DR23 |
21. Ken Chapman | Google PR4 | Alexa: 519079 | DR22 |
22. Dr. Dawg | Google PR4 | Alexa: 604062 | DR– |
23. Warren Kinsella Musings | Google PR4 | Alexa: 634795 | DR24 |
24. Dust My Broom | Google PR4 | Alexa: 714263 | DR25 |
25. April Reign | Google PR4 | Alexa: 856096 | DR– |

WEBMASTERS: Go ahead and steal any ‘Top 25′ graphics. Small Image Here. Large(r) Image Here. You can take the link, I use wordpress.com and googlepages hosting, so bandwidth is no skin off my nose (?).

“It’s my bloody right to do so”

That’s Ezra Levant’s answer to a government question. They had asked him to justify publishing the Muhammad cartoons.

You can see a few pieces of his state inquisition. It’s so genteel. But you must keep in mind what happens to him if he doesn’t appear. You have to remember that you are witnessing government force being used because of what a man thinks. No physical crime has been committed, the complainant, a radical Saudi immigrant has had no physical harm done to him, he’s not lost his job, his home, he doesn’t have a bruise on him. He’s got the state behind him because his religion was offended.

Here’s the testimony.

These commissions need to be held up to contempt. The best way to do that is to exercise the rights that they are undermining - and that is to publish these proceedings as widely as possible. To embed these videos on your blog, grab the URL from Ezra Levant’s YouTube page.

Levant on “trial” today for showing the Mohammed Cartoons

RELATED POST

Ezra Levant is on “trial” today for insulting Mohammed and hurting a Saudi Imam’s feelings. The Saudi is complaining specifically because Mr. Levant is challenging his view of Mohammed as a man who: “was never a terrorist he always preached love and respect...”

The timing is funny, because of what you can find in yesterday’s National Post. The bearded angry fellow in the picture is none other than Mohammed (fleas be upon him). With MacLean’s being brought before the “human rights” tribunals, how long before radical Mohammedans charge the National Post?

Website I’m in love with

I’m completely in love with this site. It’s an archive of cylinder recordings from the 1800’s and early 1900’s.

Listen to this, the recording of a baby crying from 1892:

Here’s Teddy Roosevelt speaking on popular sovereignty - he has an amazing accent:

Best yet, an original recording of Oh Canada - with the old lyrics (references to “The Land of Liberty” still intact):

Listen to more recordings here.

Good Start to the Year

Had some hasty salary negotiations last week and got my new job title as well. My new title is ‘Vice President, Eastern Canada’. This means that I get the Toronto office, a small local staff, a bunch of expenses taken care of and control over what I hope will be the largest and most profitable office of a growing multi-national corporation. Heading out to Toronto in a couple weeks to check on the office, look at getting things in order and meeting with companies.  Must look into this Six Sigma thing.

Finally Finished the YoungBloggers Site

That took for bloody ever, but it will be rolling out soon.  The site is called YoungBloggers.ca and it will be the blog aggregator of the BC Liberal Party’s Youth Wing.  I’ve got to finish off some of the bells and whistles but the basic thing is finally there.  That took forever.

If anyone reading this is a BCer, a bloggers and inclined to support the BC Liberals, please let me know and I’ll include you in the blogroll there and syndicate your work.

Canadians can now declare bankruptcy on student loans

If you didn’t love Stephen Harper before, you will know. Thanks to him, you can now go bankrupt on student loans after 7 years. Under previous Liberal rules, you could not declare bankruptcy on a student loan.

This finally passed through the Liberal Senate a couple weeks back and got Royal Assent last week.

You can read more about the bill here: http://www.student-loan-bankruptcy.ca/2007/11/what-are-proposed-new-student-loan.html

I can’t think of a single act in the last ten years that has helped students as much as this.

Back

Back from the holidays and back at work tomorrow.  Tonight I’m writing my business plan for the new year.  I visited our American partner while I was in New York.  Good meeting, they’ll do what we need them to do.  One thing - as soon as I get the chance I think I’ll set up a New York office and run them out of business.  I can do their job 10 times better.  That’s a couple years off for now.

My big plan for 2008 is to get away from stalkers and criminals and go somewhere where I can work and achieve as much as I am able.