Wednesday digest

- What to make of North Korea's sabre-rattling? I have to wonder - if you really wanted to scare the West, wouldn't you have them fall somewhere like the North Pacific rather than the nearest puddle? My suspicion is that like most Marxist technologies, even the short-range missiles just didn't work all that well. Maybe if man of the people Kim Jong-Il spent less money on porn and lobster, his "nukes" would have been more potent.

- Shame on Al Gore for interfering in another country's domestic affairs. The least he could have done was ask the UN for permission, doncha think? Cheap political potshots aside, articles here and here take issue with the former Veep's contentions. One thing is for sure: I'm sick of this debate. If we're going to throw millions of people out of work, expand the state and lessen everyone's disposable income based on dubious science while India and China continue to use the atmosphere as their own private outhouse, let's just get it over with.

- I hope I'm as sharp as Milton Friedman when I'm past 90. And on that note, happy Union Dues Independence Month.

- Left-wing play of the day today is a toss-up between those who think that W. had Kenneth Lay whacked and the altogether too predictable Democratic icon Ms. Sheehan, who says she'd rather live under Venezuela's Hugo Chavez (friend of Castro, Ahmedinijad and the aforementioned Kim Jong-Il) than that rascally Bush.

Hey - unlike the New York Times, I don't make the news, I just report it. (H/T: Daimnation! and Dust My Broom.)

- Finally, I'd rather not comment on it, but is anyone really surprised at the urinating on Canada's war memorial? In a country where kids don't regularly sing O Canada in the mornings at school, in a country where the soldier in uniform is looked at by many as some kind of psychotic circus freak, in a country where we are taught to be ashamed of our own history unless it involves a forty-year old pyramid scheme (health care), it's no wonder that a crowd cheered on a guy while he pissed all over the place on our country's birthday. Do you think that would ever happen in the USA? No frickin' way. He would have got the crap beat out of him. Thank God for moral violence indeed.