Sorry Greens, you had a nice run, made garbage day more complicated, wasted a ton of tax dollars, and made your leaders rich, but now its all over. As this story,”Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling” shows, global cooling this winter has wiped out a century’s worth of global warming. And apparently its all due to solar activity - nothing whatsoever to do with human activity.

So, can we finally put all this psuedo-scientific enviromania to rest and let the private sector turn its R&D attention to bio-med, nanotech, and AI? Please?

For more of the same read: A big blow to Al Gore

The Liberals persist in the pretense that you can rebuild Afghanistan without first securing it. They want our troops to sit on the sideline while others (who? the Americans?) do the fighting. That might be the Liberal way, but it isn’t the Canadian way.

The Conservative government is doing all it can to provide our excellent troops with the equipment, training, manpower and support they need to do their job. They aren’t a bunch of engineers - they are soldiers. There job is to protect us from terrorists. If they need to fight to do that, let them fight.

The Taliban would like nothing more than for the Liberals to win the next election. So bring it on, let’s fight the Liberals and the Taliban at the same time.

Read: Motion on Afghan mission hits snag

Well that worked like a charm the first time. (How often does that happen?) I had to guess about exactly what link to use in the trackback field. What you do is go to the permanent page for the post you want to trackback to. Then just copy the URL from the address bar and add “/trackback/” to the end.

The excerpt it produced could be neater. Here is what it displayed:

than wait to see if those trackbacks are approved by those other editors, I will try one on my own divorce blog. addthis_url = ‘http%3A%2F%2Fwww.howardmackinnon.com%2Fblog-marketing-trackbacks-part-2%2F’; …

Pretty ugly. It was only a short post so maybe it stuck that “addurl” stuff in the fill up space. The heading of the comment appearing on the divorce blog was an active link back to my post and that’s the main thing - getting a backlink (or a trackback).

I wonder whether Google views this any differently than reciprocal links.

Rather than wait to see if those trackbacks are approved by those other editors, I will try one on my own divorce blog.

I am learning about trackbacks so this is an attempt to see if I can actually do it right. The idea is that if you post a riff on your blog . . . (time out for translation) . . .

“post” = publish

“riff” = a post (usually a short one) that is really just a comment about a post on someone else’s blog

. . . so, if you post a riff on your blog you should enter the URL (address) of the post you are commenting on into the trackback field. That will make an excerpt of your post show up on the other blog as a comment (once that blog’s editor approves it).

Why bother?

1. You just wrote some new content on your blog.

2. You just got a link to your post in the comments section of the other guy’s blog

3. The other guy just got some new content (your excerpt in his comment section).

4. The other guy also just got a new link to his blog.

It’s a win-win. Here’s the little checklist I’ve written for it. I use WordPress (of course).

How to use trackbacks

1. Find a relevant blog which accepts Trackbacks. Use Google for this by searching for “divorce Trackbacks”.

2. Find one of the posts on that blog that you want to write a post about. This kind of post is called a “riff”.

3. Write your post as usual but be sure to refer to the other blog and include a link to it.

4. Copy and paste the TrackBack URL from the other blog post to the Trackbacks field below your new post.

5. Prepare your post for publishing in the normal way.

6. Publish your post.

Here are the two best sources of beginner level info I’ve found on this topic. The first one is a video by Jack Humphreys entitled, “How to do a TrackBack to get more links and traffic.”

The second is a tutorial called, “WordPress TrackBack tutorial“.

Now, by referring to these resources, which both appear on blogs, I have done a riff. I can now do a trackback to these two blogs. Let’s see if it works . . .

Using my usual method (see prior posts for details) here are the seat projections based on the latest SCC poll results.

This is the best of the recent polls for the CPC. In fact it is the best since the last election so it would be a fortuitous coincidence if it is the most accurate. Regardless, it is at least a hopeful sign that a majority government is within our grasp. It is certainly going to dampen whatever enthusiasm any Liberals may have for a spring election. And for Layton it would be suicide - reducing his party to below official party status.

This is hilarious - if you follow the Raptors and know the personalities, etc.

Recently Green Party leader Elizabeth May was roundly castigated for comparing those who question the scientific basis of the environmentalist crusade to those who tried to appease the Nazis prior to World War II. Well, thanks to recent comments by May’s fellow-traveler David Suzuki, we now get a chance to see who the real Nazi appeaser is.

To the applause of an audience of fellow eco-fascists at McGill University, Suzuki stated that politicians who fail to take action to protect the environment should be jailed. Is the science behind green politics so weak that dissenters must be incarcerated for it to succeed? To the list of communism and fascism do we now add environmentalism as being among those failed philosophies which cannot persuade and so must rely on brute force to achieve political influence?

So Ms. May, now you have a chance for either a measure of redemption - or to reveal yourself to be the biggest hypocrite on the Canadian political scene. Do you forthrightly condemn Suzuki’s totalitarian rant or is it really you who is the Nazi appeaser?

In the recent poll by Nanos Research Canadians indicated support for laissez-faire economic policies over government intervention as their favoured means of dealing with the economic downturn. The numbers were 53% in support of laissez-faire policies such as doing nothing, lowering taxes, or reducing the debt to 44% who favoured interventionist strategies such as creating jobs or raising wages. The remainder supported measures which could not really be characterized as either laissez-faire or interventionist such as changing the country’s leadership.