Is this Religious Freedom?

When the country de-registers all churches?
When the country de-registers all pastors?
When the country has to approve where you meet?
When the country requires all your teaching material to be approved by the state?
When the country says that at least 50 nationals must be part of the membership or else your church can not be registered?
When you must have written permission to teach children?

The new law in the country I currently reside has done all these things ...

Surprise! No warming in last 11 years « Hot Air

Check out this graph ...

Surprise! No warming in last 11 years « Hot Air

Government is the biggest job killer | John Stossel | Columnists | Washington Examiner

... I guess Obama doesn't know that the Transcontinental Railroad was a Solyndra-like Big Government scandal. The railroad didn't make economic sense at the time, so the government subsidized construction and gave the companies huge quantities of the best land on the continent.

As we should expect, without market discipline -- profit and loss -- contractors ripped off the taxpayers. After all, if you get paid by the amount of track you lay, you'll lay more track than necessary.

Credit Mobilier, the first rail construction company, made enormous profits by overcharging for its work. To keep the subsidies flowing, it made big contributions to congressmen.

Where have we heard that recently?

The transcontinental railroad lost tons of money. The government never covered its costs, and most rail lines that used the tracks went bankrupt or continued to be subsidized by taxpayers.

The Union Pacific and Northern Pacific -- all those rail lines we learned about in history class -- milked the taxpayer and then went broke.

One line worked. The Great Northern never went bankrupt. It was the railroad that got no subsidies....

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2011/10/government-biggest-job-killer#ixzz1auJjWbNy

Government is the biggest job killer | John Stossel | Columnists | Washington Examiner

The Weekend Interview with Mortimer Zuckerman: The Exasperation of the Democratic Billionaire - WSJ.com

Interesting insight from a democrat business man. Also, at the end, is his positive impression of Ronald Reagan...

The Weekend Interview with Mortimer Zuckerman: The Exasperation of the Democratic Billionaire - WSJ.com

Apologies Not Accepted - Investors.com

Even Japan does not want the apology.

Apologies Not Accepted - Investors.com

Mountains of Almaty

Pictures from the past several weekends.  First bunch is from Big Almaty Lake.  The lake is about 15 miles to our south at 8000 ft (2500 m). Sergey took us one afternoon after church.  The lake serves as the main source of Almaty's drinking water.  It also helps with avalanche and flood control.

The second bunch of photos is from downtown Almaty.  We went shopping for some souvenirs at Zoom.  Zoom is a department store building with several hundred vendors inside.  From there, we went to the Zaloni Bazaar looking for a mop.

Last bunch is from Chimbulak - Almaty's ski area about 30 minutes to the south of downtown.  The base ski area sits at 8100 ft (2300 m).  We hiked up one area to almost 12,000 ft - where the oxygen molecules are scarce!

The shocking truth about electric cars - The Globe and Mail

..... Electric cars aren’t necessarily green at all. Electric vehicles require large amounts of electricity – so much that Toronto Hydro chief Anthony Haines says he doesn’t know how he’d get it. “If you connect about 10 per cent of the homes on any given street with an electric car, the electricity system fails,” he said recently.

And if the extra electricity isn’t generated by renewable energy, then overall carbon dioxide emissions will go up, not down, Prof. Smil says. “The only way electric cars could reduce global carbon emissions would be if all the additional electricity needed to power them came from carbon-free energies.” He also makes the essential point that the world’s energy infrastructure is based on fossil fuels. Changing that will take decades....

The shocking truth about electric cars - The Globe and Mail