Hail Alberta

Arrived in Okotoks yesterday.  The gods of the foothills were displeased, I think.

Q

Greg Guttfeld's Near Surgical Strike on the "Root Causes" crowd

Root causes?

Paging Justin Trudeau.

Call your office.

The main point?   Tzarnaev (allegedly) put a bomb next to a child.  When you approach that degree of unqualified evil, the "why" doesn't matter quite so much any more.  You can't use the "root causes" ruse to try to pin that one on society.  As John Robson notes in The Sun, quite correctly I believe, "the question of root causes would be interesting if the phrase were not clearly code for 'it's our fault.'"

My personal favourite line from Gutfeld's Twitter rant (if only because I actually watched Wolf Blitzer doing this yesterday):

Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio Targeted by Mail Bomb

In the midst of a campaign to recall Mariposa County (AZ) sheriff Joe Arpaio, by a group calling itself Respect Arizona, the Sheriff's Office has indicated it will not be opening any more incoming mail. The reason?

KPHO.com (Pheonix)

An email from the sheriff's office said the decision was due, in part, to the fact that "Sheriff Arpaio is a recently targeted recipient of an explosive device."

[...]

A package containing an explosive device and addressed to Arpaio was intercepted April 11 near Flagstaff.

Officials said the package would have exploded if opened, leading to serious injuries or death.

It had been left in a parcel locker in a rural part of Coconino County, outside the Flagstaff city limits. U.S. Postal Inspection Service spokesman Keith Moore said a courier brought it into the main Post Office in Flagstaff. It was X-rayed and the device was detected. A bomb squad used a water cannon to neutralize the package.

It's been that kind of a week -- "interesting times" as the apocryphal 'old Chinese curse' (actually a more modern western invention) condemns us to live in.

Add the mail bomb threat against Sheriff Arpaio to this week's disturbing, unsettling and tragic list of events in the life of the Republic:

The Boston Marathon bombing on Patriot's Day (Monday)
The "ricin letters" delivered to lawmakers on Capitol Hill (Tuesday)
The fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas, north of Waco.(Wednesday)

Still awaiting word from Salon.com contributor David Sirota on his hopes for the race and sex of the Arizona mail bomb perpetrator.

War Memorial Defaced in Hamilton

Story via the Hamilton Spectator --

The Argyle and Sutherland War Memorial in Bayfront Park, Hamilton was defaced with graffiti. Apparently the graffiti, done in indelible black marker, alluded to First Nations grievances, although it's far from certain that the perpetrators were First Nations themselves. (I'm leaning towards white leftist/anarchist campus hangers-on -- just an educated guess.)

The graffiti was spotted by a jogger named Lino Di Julio, who expressed his disgust at the find.

“So not only is it offensive, it's ignorant,” he says. “I get that everybody wants to have their opinions heard, but… nobody who died in World War I and II is responsible for what you're angry about.”

An excellent candidate for Citizen of the Year, Di Julio took it upon himself to try to remove the graffiti and restore the solemn dignity of the memorial to this regiment's war dead. Di Julio returned the next day with cleaning supplies to tackle the job.

“I scrubbed at it for an hour and a half. It's mostly illegible now,” he said Friday morning.

By evening, as Di Julio returned to complete the task, the city's Parks Department had taken over the clean-up.

Would that more people were like Mr. Di Julio and fewer like the graffiti vandals.

Jack Layton Day, huh?

August 22nd is being co-opted by self-annointed tradition inventors and other sundry mythology mongers as Saint Jack Layton Day in the city of Toronto and beyond. Richard at Eye on a Crazy Planet suggests that we act now to restore the good name of August 22nd, a day long cherished for its non-association with coloured ribbons, trendy social causes, or identity politics sloganeering. Sounds good to me. Take back August 22nd.

Here's my contribution, via memegenerator.net

Stay thirsty, my friends.

h/t Blazing Cat Fur

Update: If August 22nd is your birthday, you share it with such celebrities as Cindy Williams and Valerie Harper, musicians Tori Amos and John Lee Hooker, writers Ray Bradbury and Dorothy Parker, baseball players Carl Yastrzemski and Paul Molitar, U.S. army commander General Norman Schwarzkopf, and Tiananmen Square commie butcher Deng Xiaoping.

“It feels horrible. There was blood and feathers everywhere.”

Left behind were the birds’ heads, claws, feathers, bones, blood and guts, as well as the unwashed saucepans, cutlery and a plate.

Curious? Check out the full story here.

Police have done the full CSI in this case.

Jönköping police have taken DNA samples from the used plate, and are labelling the crime as theft and vandalism.

What the flock?  Ritual sacrifice? Starving transient?  A plucky poacher?  A fed up neighbour ticked off by the pigeons? It's anybody's guess.

Bizarre doesn't begin to explain this. Creepy comes close.

Rats!

From the Local (Swedish mouse edition)

Gholam Hafezi was mystified when he didn't get a receipt for his 700 kronor ($104) withdrawal, but noticed instead what looked like a shoe lace hanging out of the machine, the local Västerbotten Folkblad newspaper reported.

Hafezi grabbed hold of it and to his amazement realized it was the tail of a mouse, with the head and the rest of the body stuck inside the machine.

[...]

Hafezi eventually got help from staff who were looking after trolleys, and together they managed to extract the rest of the rodent from the machine

“One of them pulled out the mouse, and its head was left intact, although it was a little bloody. Then I got out my receipt,” Hafezi told the paper.