Weirdest statement about Canada

This is from the Frum Forum, where they are posting the best and the worst of the CPAC. Here's one about Canada.

The First Reference To Canada at CPAC

Jonah Goldberg delivers the first reference To Canada at CPAC: “Canada is a Northern Puerto Rico with an EU sensibility.” Well, at least this time he’s not urging us to bomb it.

Have no understanding what this means, since Puerto Rico is a US territory and its citizens are our citizens. Nor do I know what an EU sensibility is.

But it probably isn't positive.

Curious coincidence

I was putting up a post on that other blog, shamelessly blaming Canada for our weather in order to avoid taking personal responsibility for the situation here at Clemens' Central, when I noticed a curious little detail of the video link. The unhinged leader of this baseless hate campaign against The Great White North, looks exactly like Virginia Foxx.

Coincidence?

I think not.

Have you ever noticed that in English that last little sentence can be read two ways?

Banks in Canada

Over on the Washington Post today Steven Pearlstein has done a Q & A with the public (for his column referred to in much of the discussion, click here). Someone asked him how the Canadian banking system seemed to be in so much better health than the American. His reply:

The Canadians have a more logical regulatory structure, as I understand it. They also have more respect for civil servants and government in general, and bank regulators in particular -- the Canadian public, for some reason I never understood, gets very agitated when banks make too much profit. Kind of a populist thing from the prairie. But what's also at work is that their banks are simply more conservatively run and haven't got caught up in the kind of silly and dangerous competition that the big American banks have.

The Canadian Way. I always thought it was much like the Minnesota Way until Minnesotans decided their distinctive heritage could be safely relegated to "The Prairie Home Companion" and joined the national culture.

alas poor Anoka.

WW I and the Canadians

A rare color photo of Canadian troops, of the 19th Winnipeg Rifles. (et al.)

Those Clever Canadian Scientists

From "Science Now" (via Andrew Sullivan) comes this startling experiment performed by our death defying neighbors to the north:

Jeffrey Mogil of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and his colleagues noticed that male mice spent less time licking the site of a painful injection--indicating that they had less pain--when a scientist was present. To investigate whether it was the sight or smell of a human that caused the effect, the researchers acquired a promotional cardboard cutout of [Paris] Hilton from her television show The Simple Life ("A special order," says Mogil's collaborator Leigh MacIntyre).

As in humans, Paris's effect appears to be gender-specific. Male mice spent less time licking their wounds when fake Paris was in sight, but females showed no such effect, the researchers reported ... When the team put up a screen to block the rodents' view, the effect went away. Following a Paris Hilton encounter, male mice--but not females--also had lower-than-usual expression of a gene called c-fos in a part of the spinal cord that transmits pain signals to the brain, suggesting reduced neural activity in this pain pathway.

Mogil suspects the analgesic effect has something to do with stress.

I wish that I had made this up, but I am not that clever.

Anti-immigration rules and employment

Actually, I am not sure if this is because of stupidly restrictive rules, incompetence in ICE, or simple nastiness. But the anti-immigration mood IS having an impact.

Earlier this week, Microsoft announced the opening of a software development centre in Vancouver after losing a fight to ease restrictions on the admission of foreign workers to the United States.

Well, there goes the computer industry.

Way to go, Canada.*


*The views of this song do not necessarily reflect the views of this blog nor its administrator.

Chinese/Canadian blog - plus music

Wandering through the ether of blogland I discovered this interesting blog, 'Lotus and Cedar.' It's bilingual, sometimes trilingual. Half of it seems to be in Chinese, about half in English (Canadian version). Whoever the author is, he lists his choice of the best five songs of the 20th century. Check it out to see what his picks are.

I've already linked to the two Spanish songs in honor of Carmen over on Not Mayberry, but you can listen to number one here.


Why is it the Canadians seem to have the blogs that appeal to me most? Could it be the same reason the French didn't think I acted like an American? Whatever that meant.