Wednesday digest

- Crucial details are still emerging about the Virginia Tech tragedy. While I have some strong views to share, I won't be posting them until later this week because I think it would be premature to draw conclusions right now.

- Do you not care for the John Lennon song "Imagine"? I don't either, and not just because it's not that catchy a tune. We're not alone. See here for another take on the hippie anthem. When I was in grade 9, my high school had some social(ist) justice-themed day and they played "Imagine" over the PA system while we all sat through homeroom like the gullible, malleable 14 year olds we were. That type of nonsense is probably still happening as it has for the last 35 years, which is 35 years too many in my books.

- What's the point of the NDP these days? The Mayor of Toronto, who has made no secret of his affiliation with the socialist party, has now left it. They're clearly sweating the emergence of the Green Party. Former party comms director Jamey Heath says it's time for a long look in the mirror. And, with hapless Trudeaupian Stephane Dion at the helm of the Liberal party, dyed-in-the-wool statists can be more than comfortable voting for it rather than risk splitting the anti-Conservative vote further.

(A note to readers from the US: be happy that the above passage makes no sense to you.)

- I've been calling for this for months now.

- Is American public opinion throwing out the Darfur baby with the Iraq bathwater? (That'd make a hell of an editorial cartoon, but I'm a terrible drawer.) Meanwhile, this writer suggests that Iran might be playing both sides off of each other in Iraq. Although I can't see any self-respecting Sunni terrorist insurgent accepting weaponry from Shi'a Iran, it's not entirely out of the realm of possibility.

- Here's a great piece which takes sends up those who are all aboard the global warming bandwagon but sheepishly clam up when it comes to talk about practical realities.

Some choice lines:

Katrina was the liberal equivalent of neoconservatives’ blaming Saddam for 9/11, a connect-the-dots opportunity too good to resist, even if it wasn’t true.

Americans have shown themselves willing to undertake epic battles against evil only when there’s somebody else to hold accountable—Nazis, communists, radical Islamists. But blaming and changing our own Homer Simpson–ish ways of life? We couldn’t even make Prohibition work.

Gore/Schwarzenegger, anybody?

- Finally, here's a piece on envy. In a time where generalized economic illiteracy is regularly mixed with populist, class-based rhetoric - thank you, Lou Dobbs - the cure could very well be worse than the disease.

- UPDATE: This is the real finally. Bruce Willis is reportedly dating Courtney Love. I know some people who would pay to see that, no questions asked.