Our friends the Canadian government

You have to love it when a Canadian official calls our President a moron. It sort of takes one to know one, especially where the Canadian government (not its people) are concerned.
On the other hand our State Department doesn’t exactly have a handle on the language.

In Washington, a State Department official whose area of responsibility includes Canada said he hadn’t heard about the remark. In any event, he said: “We have no intention of going anywhere near it with a 10-foot pole.”

OK…so what do you have an intention of going near it with? A five-foot Japanese?
[SUDDEN THOUGHT: Send that 10-foot Pole to Indianapolis, we can use him on the Pacers.]

Well, it is funny…

Like Eugene Volokh, I don’t agree with the politics of this gag, but overall it looks like something I would have done 20 years ago if I had had a Mac, Photoshop and, er, talent.* (Invitations to parties at my home in those days were generally sent out as movie poster spoofs.)
*Not that I’d buy a Mac today, nor that I have Photoshop or talent along these lines today.

Annoying ads

Listening to Rush, and hearing these grating phoned-in ads (local ads, during the breaks) for a company called Frontline Security. This woman who supposedly owns the company has one of the most annoying voices I’ve ever heard. The advertising school of thought that says “it may be annoying but people will remember it” doesn’t work well with me, because indeed I do remember it…and I won’t ever buy anything from them.
Same thing with this Billy Mays character who does the TV ads on Fox and other channels. I wouldn’t buy anything he flacks in a million years.

This is not a problem.

I see the government wants to keep a massive database of all of our purchases.
This doesn’t worry me. Who, precisely, is going to read and correllate this data? The already overworked and generally-terrorism-impaired intelligence community. Keep all the data you want about the books I buy, the weapons I keep supplied with ammo, and the meals I eat. I don’t care.
Information glut is going to kill any real chance of our vaunted intelligence agencies actually finding anything before it’s too late. This is what happened before Pearl Harbor — the ratio of noise to signal was way too high for any meaningful intelligence to be developed. This kind of stupidity just adds to the noise.

Stupid.

Another homicide bomber in Jerusalem.
It’s past time for the Israelis to start in the North with a line of armed soldiers and just walk south through the country, like we used to do in the Boy Scouts when we policed our campsites before leaving. Somehow you’ve just got to pick up the trash, and Hamas definitely qualifies as trash.