So everyone on the Tour de France is doping... or at the least the top riders... so my question is why is anyone testing? Let the riders do what they please. They will probably do more for medical research than testing the effect of drugs, blood transfusions and the like on rats. Let them go mad. Who is going to be hurt? The guy who isn't doping but would like to but is afraid of getting caught? The playing field will be levelled as everyone will have access to the latest and greatest drugs and techniques. The amount of money being spent in this silly big brother imposition of morality is ridiculous and the results are what? A couple of guys get kicked out and those that have the better technology or the luck of the draw survive. I just can't get upset over people taking advantage of new technology, be mechanical or medicinal.

Robert Mugabe is going to fix all of the Zimbabwe's economic ills, brought about through no fault of his own, through the strict enforcement of price controls and the nationalization of industry...which was part of the problem I thought... but what the hell..

President Robert Mugabe has said at the opening of parliament that strict price controls will continue as Zimbabwe tries to turn around an ailing economy.

The country, once the bread-basket of the region, is suffering crippling food shortages and rampant inflation.

Mr Mugabe blamed droughts and sanctions for their economic woes and said they faced continued hostility from the UK and her Western allies.

A bill to nationalise foreign firms, including banks and mines, is planned.

Well, it hasn't worked anywhere else in the world, but Zimbabwe/Mugabe are setting the world course for sustainable development so they must know something that we capitalists do not. Of course one way is to cut down on the number of poor is to have them leave the country:

Economic refugees are arriving in neighbouring states like South Africa at a rate of around 3,000 a day.

And, beyond economic controls, a political solution also appears to be in the makes:

Talks between the ruling Zanu-PF and the opposition MDC to find a political solution appear to have stalled, our reporter says.

The MDC wants a new constitution, but the only amendment on the parliamentary agenda could extend the president's term to 2010.

For those of us in Canada and the west in general who look to the UN as some sort of moral foreign policy guide, look again. The UN simply gives legitimacy and cover to tyrants and strongmen.

Must NBC Stop Running Law & Order If Fred Thompson Announces His Candidacy or else face the obligation to give rival candidates equal time?

Apparently the answer is yes... or maybe... or who knows?

Does it also mean that the networks cannot show any of his movies including Hunt for the Red October, Cape Fear and Die Hard II unless they also show an equal amount of footage of Hillary Clinton sitting through Bill's impeachment hearings? Thompson was also on some episodes of Matlock, which seems to run on cable 24 hours a day, and he did an episode of Sex and the City.

 "The ban on DDT," says Gwadz of the National Institutes of Health, "may have killed 20 million children."

(via Instapundit)

Canada's top doctor singled out New Democrat leader Jack Layton yesterday for "hypocrisy" for undergoing hernia treatment at a private Toronto medical clinic.

But Brian Day, president-elect of the Canadian Medical Association, was quick to note Layton is in good company.

Former prime ministers Paul Martin, Jean Chretien and Joe Clark also have been treated at private medical clinics, Day told the annual meeting of the Canadian Science Writers' Association.

And he said union leader Buzz Hargrove, president of the Canadian Autoworkers, proved a master at "queue jumping" when he got in for an MRI within 24 hours of injuring his leg.

Read the rest

via Tim Blair, the statist greens are getting spanked:

Let me tell you, you Peruvian-hatted puritan apostles of grassy nihilism, the single hottest problem facing the planet is not global warming, but the viciously smug fundamentalist prohibitionists of the green movement. Those wholemealy-mouthed ecologists, who devoutly wish to reduce everyone else’s existence to a self-righteous nose-drip probity that never moves more than four miles from the communal yurt, never eats anything that hasn’t been grown in the communal dung and never thinks anything that isn’t collectively miserabilist, are going to destroy life as we know it faster than an equator of traffic jams, a continent of unlagged lofts and a squadron of circling jumbos.

RCMP officers who have abused prisoners, committed sexual assault, hired prostitutes while on duty or showed up drunk for work have rode off with a reprimand and docked pay, 24 hours news services has learned.

Read the rest.

UPDATE: Read this one as well...

Judge's withering ruling cites family tie between Mountie and top Liberal

UPDATE II: Of course the top Liberal's in Ontario are not that concerned about police misconduct, instaed they are seeking to increase the powers of the police.

 The police should have sweeping powers to seize documents from the media, even if a confidential source might be identified, a senior government lawyer argued Tuesday.

Let's just ignore the fact that the bad apples have already spoiled the barrel.

I just finished examinations for discovery of a Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) auditor (I was on my best behaviour). My client had a lot of income attributed to him for tax purposes, the evidence of which is almost nil. What was most interesting is CRA attributing to my client the money to pay taxes in the total income. In other words, if CRA says that you have $50,000 in hidden income, they say that you must pay taxes on the income and they increase the amount of the income by the taxes you should have paid and readjust the tax figure upward. Or at least that's what I think they did because the auditor, to his credit, honestly stated that she could not tell me the logic of the policy or the calculator, simply that it was the policy of CRA.

Also interesting was the requirement to show a negative. Say my client does not smoke or drink but Statistics Canada says that the average Canadian spends a certain amount on tobacco and alcohol, the CRA attributes the Stats Canada amount to my client as expenditures which require the income to make the purchase. How my client can show no receipts for no cigarette purchases from no store is hard to understand, but what the hell. The same goes for life insurance. My client does not have life insurance but has an income amount attributed based on the Stats Canada numbers. You cannot show a contract that does not exist.

It was an eye-opener.

 I think I should be able to get a decent result in this particular case despite the reverse onus that is almost impossible to meet  simply becayuse the onus is almost impossible to meet.

(crosspost at The London Fog)

from the National Post:

Three Halton police constables have been charged with assaulting a 79-year-old retired teacher who was shot with a rubber bullet and tasered during an arrest in Oakville last fall. Gerry Morgan died in May, six months after he was arrested at a Marine Drive home at 4:30 a.m. on Nov. 25, 2006. A woman who identified herself as his daughter answered the phone at Mr. Morgan's home yesterday: "My dad was a wonderful man." She said her father had four children-- two daughters and two sons --and taught at teacher's college and was a consultant with the Halton and Dufferin-Peel Catholic school boards. Mr. Morgan was arrested after Halton Regional Police Services responded to a call for assistance. "While inside the home, officers employed use of force weapons," the Special Investigations Unit said in a statement yesterday. "They discharged an ARWEN (Anti Riot Weapon Enfield) weapon and as a result, Gerry Morgan was struck once with a projectile made of rubber-like material and the allegation is that he suffered a serious injury to his upper arm. Officers also used a TASER device on Mr. Morgan and the allegation is that when he fell to the floor, Mr. Morgan suffered a broken hip." The trio will appear in court on May 28.

Justin Trudeau...now there's a deep thinker ... Speaking to "adoring" high school students, he offered this:

Trudeau suggested to the students the capitalist "machine" that sustains modern existence may also become modern civilization's downfall.

The system promotes exploitation of natural resources without accounting for future consequences of consumption, he said.

"Our capitalist model has given us tremendous things," Trudeau said. "But the time has come for us to look at it critically and try to improve on it, given the accelerated pace of change and the fact that we have limited space."

Trudeau said Canada's environmental and social justice record have deteriorated.

"We consume more water per capita than anyone else on the planet. We produce more solid waste than just about anyone else on the planet. In terms of social justice, our treatment of our aboriginal communities are an absolute disgrace."

Tinkering with capitaism by placing state controls on the market have failed worldwide. Sure the civil servants make out like bandits, but the rest of us are left beholden to the state to maintain some sort of passable standard of living. Still, the juvenile question, why can't we all just get along, makes the idea of tinkering for the greater good desirable.

Trudeau seems able to spout his old man's conclusions, but I doubt he's given it much thought. For his information, we have more water than anyone else, per capita or in volume. Are we supposed to stop consuming water just because there is less water in Arizona? Stop Consuming out of guilt? Where is the water going if we don't consume it? I'm not talking about draining the rivers or anything, but water consumption is not exactly a priority for Canadains is it?  More solid waste? Huh? We are 30 million people with, in case you haven't noticed,  plenty of places to put it and the natural resources of Canada are found in alomst all of them. I guess we are going to run out of trees soon ...wait...the tree cover in North America is increasing .... never mind. The Liberal policy of throwing money at aborignals until they are all dead is something that Mr Trudeau can address with his party if and when he gets elected.

Cash Money. It is the legal tender of the country and you can buy whatever you want with it from anyone but the Candadian government:

Cash no longer accepted for paying taxes

Ottawa will no longer accept cash payments from people paying their taxes at service counters across the country.

The Canada Revenue Agency says it will still accept cash payments made through banks, however. Service counters will continue to accept cheque and debit payments.

Apparently it's too inconvenient....

The agency says it made the change because the amount of people who pay by cash is so small.

Of the seven per cent of taxpayers who make payments at the service counters, less than one per cent pay by cash, said Revenue Canada spokesperson Heather Cameron.

"It comes down to the fact … that there's so few people that are actually making their payments in cash now," said Cameron.

And here I was thinking that it was legal tender and if you tendered it on the government in payment, the government is to accept the same. A refusal to accept would certainly give rise to the question of whether penalties or interest would accrue.

(also at The London Fog)

I had a call from a client all concerned about her Charter rights being violated by her employer. While it was dubious that her contractual rights, let alone her rights under provincial human rights legislation, had been violated in any regard, the simple rule is that the Charter applies to state actions. Still, we have people always going on about their rights, not realizing that the rights they clam are mere privileges bestowed by the applicable legislature.

Racial profiling is an issue for the police. Some racial profiling is apparently acceptable when you are running an affirmative action program.Other racial profiling is not good,as in  when the police stop a driver simply because he is black. Now racial profiling has taken on  a whole new realm, that of international hockey, according to Gilles Duceppe:

Doan says all he did was make a sarcastic remark to a teammate, Curtis Joseph, who was infuriated by a penalty call in a game against the Montreal Canadiens.

He says he told Joseph: ''Four French referees in Montreal, Cuje, figure it out.'' And Joseph has backed up his story.

But Duceppe called even that comment unacceptable. He said his party is right to demand answers from Hockey Canada.

''That's what you call racial profiling,'' Duceppe said.

Now that Doan had the ethnic profile of these homer refs, what was he going to do about it? Nothing. Why? Because there was nothing he could do. He's the citizen on the ice and the refs are the cops.

Noticing someone is from Newfoundland because of their accent is not "racial profiling" it's being alive and not deaf. Same thing with someone from Quebec. It would only be possession the power to affect the identified and then the actual taking of action  that would make this observation racial profiling.  This has gotten beyond ridiculous.

Reject the message...and also the messenger

With respect to a NY Times editorial calling for stonger controls to prevent Virginia Tech like murders, Prof. Volokh asks:

What stronger controls over weapons would likely have stopped him from committing the murders, or even led him to kill fewer people?

Note that I'm not asking what controls would have prohibited him from doing something. Murder law, and for that matter the gun control law that banned firearms from campus, already prohibited him from committing mass murder. That didn't seem to help. I'm curious what "stronger controls" would likely have stopped a would-be mass murderer from killing, or at least killing as many.

(The comment thread should be good. The Volokh Conspiracy, to which I often link, usually elicits some very intelligent comments and debates.)

It is the same question that was flowing around the firm and the courts yesterday. There were the immediate comments on American gun culture, but they were quickly tempered by the question of what gun law could have prevented this shooting. Look at Dawson College in Montreal where the shooter complied with the very strict Canadian laws. Fewer people died, but not from a lack of effort: the shooter hit 20 people.

Remember the genocide in Rawanda- it was carried out by machete.

UPDATE: David Frum is kind of asking the same question (via Peaktalk):

America will try to learn lessons from this latest tragedy too. But there is no escaping the hardest lesson: that death lies waiting around the corner for us all. No public policy can rescue us from that grim human fact - or the equally fearful obligation to walk with courage under the burden of the reality of evil.

 The MapMaster: "...Environment Canada will be issuing a "be vewy afwaid" climate warning."

This, of course, marks the second alarmist release by the UN this year, both coming before its own scientific report on global warming is even out.

Just why would the UN release these teaser summaries before its actual scientific findings are available? It could it be that the science is becoming less alarming as scientists learn more, so the UN wants to maximize the public hysteria before its catastrophic forecasts for the future can be checked against the more moderate scientific truth.

We already know that the coming report -- the fourth by the UN in 15 years -- will say that maximum projected temperatures over the next century will not be nearly as high as projected in the last report in 2001; that man has contributed less to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than originally thought; and that sea level rise will be only a few inches, rather than the several feet once thought.

Yet the so-called "summaries for policy makers" are becoming more shrill each time: Species will be wiped out, crime will rise, starvation will kill hundreds of millions, disease will become rampant, islands will disappear beneath the waves, deserts will consume entire continents.

Science goes down, UN hysteria goes up. Curious, isn't it, how that plays into the UN's desire to be at the centre of a global effort to plan human activity?

Read the rest.

(Via Bourque)

cross posted at The London Fog

... Castro 'was close to death'

(or so says the ever reliable Hugo )

Law Of Unintended Taxequences