North Western Winds

One : I submit, that a Tory who can't find a single disagreeable thing to say about Rosalie Abella, is a Tory in the middle stage of a brain transplant. This is the woman who attempted to establish, as a young family court judge, such remarkable legal principles as that no child support payment can be "inappropriately" high; or that the final, contractual terms of a divorce settlement may be reopened at the woman's whim. These, and other such creative judgements, were struck down by higher courts. But now, Ms Abella IS the Supreme Court. Her views on anal intercourse alone -- and they are extensive -- would have been worth exploring. Two : It is that they [Jihadis] don't make distinctions between infidels. They don't seek "fellow travellers" as the Communists did, when, at the height of the Cold War, the Soviet state was massively funding, both openly and secretly, "peace" movements across Europe and America, as a way to subvert th...

Picture and quote via Davids Medienkritik: One could analyze Der Spiegel’s cover story sentence for sentence and still arrive at only the same conclusion a quick scan yields. Der Spiegel presents, from the picture on the cover to the last line in the article, a demagogic, biased, wholesale anti-Bush and anti-American screed. Typical Der Spiegel fare. I have been taking a look at a new blog over the past couple of days. It is a critical look at the media in Germany, written in English. It is of interest to me because my family is of German and Central European origins, and so it is nice to hear and see what is going on in that corner of the world. It is also intersting to try and understand where European anti- Americanism comes from.

From Thomas Sowell at the Washington Times (please go and read all of his books, he's worth reading): Sometimes little things can tell you about big things. While Sen. John Kerry and his running-mate Sen. John Edwards were recently photographed at lunchtime at Wendy's, to show what regular guys they are, their real lunch was from a local yacht club, which is more their speed in real life. There is nothing wrong with eating lunch from or at a yacht club. What is wrong is being phony — and thinking the American people need to be conned. ... These guys are on the far left of a liberal party. What does that mean in concrete terms? Among other things, it means racial quotas, higher taxes, weakening the military, and — perhaps most significant of all — appointing liberal judges who will spend decades finding reasons to turn criminals loose and allowing frivolous lawsuits that drive up prices to consumers and destroy businesses and jobs. You can't run on that platform and w...

Walking the dogs. Mill Lake park, Abbotsford. From left to right, Curt, wife Rebecca, Curt's mom, Marlis. Curt's dad is behind the camera. 

Mill Lake park, Abbotsford 

My neighborhood. What's not to like? 

On my old blog I had a habit of linking to a few current news stories on the right frame and calling those links 'hotlinks'. I'd change them periodically. I think I'm going handle that idea differently now that I'm on blogger. Linking is easier now, as is creating an blog entry. So I think I'll create posts from time to time under the title 'things to think about'. Maybe I'll come up with a better title later or maybe I won't. Anyway, I'll just put the links up and see what happens. New Paths of Religion in Europe Ethics and Medics An interview with Satan (funny) Canada the toothless wonder puppy

I just love this little cartoon. So often they take themselves just so- ooo seriously. The attitude is that anyone who disagrees with anything they say, well, they just must be stupid, or, more likely they're just evil . Isn't that right, Federal Liberal MP Carolyn Parish? Which is funny, because as best as I've heard it, radical libs don't actually believe in evil. It's only one of many examples of Liberal incoherence. Too often they remind me of silly little debate I heard as an undergraduate. A passionate young feminist was very forcefully arguing that there "were no absolutes, that's a given, we all know that." And she looks around top see if anyone - anyone - dared to disagree. And then she realized she her own claim was an absolute. It being the so PC 1990s, no one dared to say anything, although there must have been someone in the room who grasped that she was making a very old and fundamental mistake. Caught on her own harpoon, s...

Ok, so I'm still playing around with Blogger and my software, to see what I can do. Blogger is web based, so software shouldn't be an issue, except that I am toying a lot these days with a browser called Firefox . I had been using Explorer for a long time previously but a week or so ago I started to play with it to see if I could make browsing my bookmarks easier. I had some success but no home run. A peek at Download.com 's browser section lead me to Firefox and it was a go almost from the beginning. Firefox is smart, stripped down and clean. It uses tabs intelligently, unlike Netscape, which in which I discovered three different places to conduct a search from. Firefox has one search box and you can easily add as many search engines to it as you like, including Google, Google Images, Amazon books, Amazon DVD's, Wikkipedia, and... well. You get the idea. I was beginning to get hooked. Another big (BIG)! point in Firefox's favour was the Bug Me Not extension, wh...

It's well past time I should have moved my blog to an on line blog service. I've been doing something like this for more than a few years (four or five) and have long wanted a simple, fast way of doing updates. If it's not simple, it very often doesn't get done. That goes some way toward explaining the ever decreasing number of updates my site has seen over the last year and a half. It's my hope that creating this new home for my writings will allow me to recapture some of the fun that posting used to be. It is also my hope that interacting with the blogging and blog reading community will fuel my thoughts and keep me tethered to the earth. My old home can still be viewed at Virtual Planet [link deleted], but I don't expect to add anything to that site if I can get this to work satisfactorily. And I'm pretty optimistic about that.