Oh, Canada, you have once again proven you are superior in all things. Please don't fuck it up.

Wait, why would the first item be the opposite of a Christmas miracle?

There is entirely too much snow where that dog lives!

To be fair to network weather reporters, they are not equipped to explain climate change to their audience each time they tell you about a storm, nor does their audience want to hear about it.

Unfortunately.

To be fair, it has ALWAYS been legal in Canada to sell sex. This decision made all the activities associated with that legal too (keeping a bawdy house, communicating with clients in public, and being able to hire staff)

Like the dog, hate the Times/OSPI.

Folks, if you want your child's student data given away -to a for-profit group like the Times, stay silent. Let Superintendent Randy Dorn know,this is a no-go for you. (And fyi, you have our friends at the Gates Foundation to thank for this.)

Randy I. Dorn
superintendent@k12.wa.us
(360) 725-6004

Ah Catholic schools and their sanctity of marriage! Reminds me of the teacher and student at my catholic high school who both got pregnant while unmarried. The response to both was basically "get married or be fired/kicked out"

Snowing outside is always better than snowing inside.

The Seattle Times reports that Mr. Zmuda "resigned" his position. Give me a fucking break.

Good for the ECHS alumni. That's the way to get it done. Plus, it shows the diocese that their "best and brightest" think their policy is ridiculous.

And 7, at my very public high school (in Iowa, in the 80's) if you were a girl who got knocked up, you had to go to the Alternative High School. (That's what they called it. And it was in an old warehouse. I was never in the building, but it always seemed like something out of a John Waters movie.)

The boy who did the fathering could, of course, stay at the "normal" school.

Heifer International is such a piece of shit organization. It's so demeaning, culturally insensitive, borderline imperialist. If people are poor, give them money directly. There are lots of direct aid organizations now. Even poor brown people are people and they know what they want or need. Don't give them a fucking cow to make yourself feel superior to them. I wish we had moral billionaires, but I guess morality isn't part of the billionaire job description.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2008/07/12/w…

@10

Okay, thanks; I thought you were referring to the protests as opposed to the firing as the opposite of the Christmas miracle, since the fact that there is such a response a bit of a miracle in and of itself.

People who fear the government spying on them and using their information against their wishes should realize that private industries - the Glorious Free Market - have been doing this for decades, on a much larger scale, and with far less security.

@12: I suppose you don't agree with giving a man a fishing rod instead of a fish, either?

16- I don't agree with giving a man a fishing rod or fish if he doesn't like fish and all the lakes are polluted where he lives anyway. Give them money or health care or power to stop people from exploiting them. It's so ridiculously condescending to be handing out COWS.

It's awful for the local environment and world, too, because livestock is by far the biggest cause of land degredation and climate change emissions in poorer areas (and it's a lot - far more significant than our cars and airplanes).

@16: Raku is spot on in this case. Better to give the man the $ to buy a fishing rod if he chooses, or a weir, or a seine.

Direct aid gets far better results than in-kind.

@18 Ah, but in-kind gets far better tax treatment. Let's say said billionaire buys feeder cattle, and turns them out to pasture, on land he's getting ag payments to keep fallow. The things grow and appreciate in value. The steers get sold off for meat, and the cows, now worth much more than they cost, though not champion milkers, are donated to the poor. The donor gets to deduct the full retail value of the animals being donated, without having to pay income tax on their appreciated value.

It's like a triple-tax win. I doubt he's actually netting money from the deal, but it's costing him a lot less than donating cash.

Weather reports bearing no relation to actual weather is nothing new. Well, it's nothing new in Chicago at least.

@19: indeed. And just another example of how the majority of our humanitarian aid programs aren't very effective. And in some cases actually cost lives (trucks carrying donated food from 6000 miles away driving past warehouses filled with grain grown right there for example).

@22 Rosanne is batshit insane, so...yup.

@12 actually Heifer is an amazing organization that brings common agricultural sense to the gift giving. When giving large livestock they don't give just one animal to a person, they give a breeding pair of two to two people in a village/region. Those owners are then required to gift a calf to someone else, thus extending the gift to a third person/family. If animals are not involved, people receiving education on how to raise things are required to teach others in their area.
Animals are provided that are realistic to specific areas, i.e. For those opposed to the use of animals as food product, there are sustainable farming initiatives as well. In addition, for those that can't afford a whole animal, shares are available. This year marks my 30th water buffalo. To the naysayers I respond: MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO