Diogenes Borealis

Blues for a Saturday Night

2012-02-11T17:00:00.000-05:00

Tonight's selection: Dani Wilde performs I Love You More Than I Hate Myself, from her debut album Heal My Blues, in a 2008 live performance in Germany.

Blues for a Saturday Night

2012-02-04T17:00:00.004-05:00

Tonight's selection: Canada's own Dutch Mason, "Prime Minister of the Blues", singing Sonny Boy Williamson's Nine Below Zero. I had the pleasure of hearing him perform this song live at the now-defunct Albert's Hall in Toronto in the 1980s - he was an unforgettable presence on stage, always singing with a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other. Dutch died in 2006 but his legendary stature among Canadian blues artists is undiminished.

Clueless in Kingston

2012-01-30T16:38:00.005-05:00

Thank goodness we have reporters to analyze things for us. CTV News Montreal Bureau Chief Genevieve Beauchemin stated the blindingly obvious after the verdict was delivered in the Shafia honour-killing trial on Sunday:

Beauchemin said there will be no victim impact statement following the trial. She said that may be because relatives stood by the accused throughout the trial.

Do you think maybe the fact that the victims were found at the bottom of the Rideau Canal having died at the hands of their surviving relatives might have had something to do with the absence of victim impact statements? Just a hunch.

Oops - forget global warming; there's a mini ice age coming

2012-01-29T09:31:00.005-05:00

The UK's Daily Mail reports that the Met Office and the University of East Anglia have, "without fanfare", released data showing that there has been no global warming for the past 15 years and that a "mini ice age" may be imminent:

The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.

The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.

Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.

Meanwhile, leading climate scientists yesterday told The Mail on Sunday that, after emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th Century, the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of the season available for growing food.

You don't say. The UK's Met Office and the University of East Anglia are the chief proponents of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis that has resulted in the hasty implementation of poorly-planned, coercive and expensive "green energy" policy initiatives by governments world-wide. Dalton McGuinty - call your office.

Blues for a Saturday Night

2012-01-28T17:00:00.000-05:00

Tonight's selection: the late Eva Cassidy covers T Bone Walker's "Call It Stormy Monday" in a 1996 live performance at Washington's Blues Alley:

Pierre Trudeau: "a run-of-the-mill social democrat"

2012-01-28T15:13:00.002-05:00

Don't miss Conrad Black's comments on the late great Pierre Trudeau in today's National Post. An excerpt:

Nor is there truth to the theory that Trudeau possessed any original political ideas. He was a run-of-the-mill 1960s social democrat who wanted big government, the nanny-, know-it-all-state, high taxes, and the confiscation of income from those who had earned it for redistribution to those who had not in exchange for their votes (far beyond what could be justified by the acquisition of votes for federalism in Quebec, where the money transfer was also largely from the non-French to the French).

It was hard to square Trudeau’s professed enthusiasm for civil rights with his friendship with Fidel Castro and other dictators who ruined their countries, such as Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, and his cold-shouldering of Soviet dissidents and other international civil rights advocates, and even the Canadian victims of the Korean airliner the Russians shot down. This was of a piece with his fawning deference to the Soviet leadership and his antagonism to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and even Richard Nixon, who all regarded him as little better than a communist fellow traveller (and told me so).

His campaign to reorient the Canadian economy away from exports to the United States was authoritarian rather than based on any fiscal incentivization of competition, and was a fiasco. His pursuit of arms control was chimerical; he disarmed Canada, did nothing to reduce the country’s military dependence on Washington, and produced a nonsensical plan for more conferences to agree on the unverifiable “suffocation” of defence spending.

Blues for a Saturday Night

2012-01-21T17:00:00.001-05:00

Tonight's selection - Jimmy Smith, the Paganini of the Hammond B3 organ, covering Blues in the Night

Harper's true hidden agenda: promoting gay rights overseas

2012-01-18T21:12:00.002-05:00

Matt Gurney of the National Post writes that, for a government with a supposedly anti-gay "hidden agenda", the federal Conservatives sure are going out of their way to stand up for gay rights in oppressive Third World countries. In his op-ed If the Tories hate gays, why are they standing up for them abroad?, Gurney writes:

Yes, it’s true. As part of promoting Canadian values abroad, the Conservative government has been speaking out at international forums, particularly the Commonwealth, against nations that oppress the rights of homosexuals. Embassy magazine, a weekly foreign policy journal published in Ottawa, interviewed a series of experts on global gay rights, and found that the Tories have spoken out forcefully against a series of Third World countries that were considering passing laws that would have made homosexuality illegal, or even subject to the death penalty. And the Tories, Embassy notes, have also made the decriminalization of homosexuality a foreign policy objective.

Nor are they doing it only through back channels. As part of the Conservative effort to draw attention to the oppression of homosexuals, both Immigration Minister Jason Kenney and Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird have spoken publicly against the oppression of gays. This might not get much notice inside Canada — some of the experts Embassy contacted hadn’t even realized the Conservative government was working to help gays abroad — but it is happening. Indeed, if one wanted to look for a hidden agenda, you could almost infer that the Tories are conducting a stealth pro-gay campaign abroad that’s drawing little notice in Canada.

That’s not particularly likely, either, of course. What’s more likely is that gay rights and Conservative ideology have finally aligned in Canada. Many conservative voters, and Tory MPs, may well have moral objections to homosexuality, but they also have a strong, patriotic belief that their country has superior values worth exporting, and those values include such things as equal rights for citizens, even homosexuals. As uncomfortable as homosexual sex may still make many people feel, those same people will have no trouble believing their country’s equal treatment of gays proves its moral superiority. Patriotism, in short, trumps squeamishness.

Gay rights are human rights, and that's the common ground that conservatives who believe in the sanctity of individual liberty share, whether they're gay or straight.

Blues for a Saturday Night

2012-01-14T17:00:00.001-05:00

Tonight's selection: a live version of Buddy Guy performing Damn Right I've Got The Blues, with a virtuoso backup performance on the Hammond B3 organ.

Gay marriage meltdown in Ottawa

2012-01-12T19:45:00.014-05:00

I hesitate to weigh in on the gay marriage "controversy" now raging in Ottawa because the left is going absolutely apoplectic about it, but it needs to be pointed out that this is not an issue about gay marriage, but about gay divorce, and the legal facts are getting lost in the wailing and gnashing of teeth.

The Globe and Mail breathlessly reported today that the Harper government had made an "about face" on the issue of gay marriage and was arguing in Federal Court that gay couples from foreign jurisdictions where same-sex marriage is not legal cannot be legally wed in Canada:

The Harper government has served notice that thousands of same-sex couples who flocked to Canada from abroad since 2004 to get married are not legally wed.

But speaking in Halifax Thursday, the Prime Minister said the issue was not on the agenda for his majority Conservatives. “We have no intention of further re-opening or opening this issue,” Stephen Harper told reporters when asked about The Globe and Mail’s report.

The reversal of federal policy is revealed in a document filed in a Toronto test case launched recently by a lesbian couple seeking a divorce. Wed in Toronto in 2005, the couple have been told they cannot divorce because they were never really married – a Department of Justice lawyer says their marriage is not legal in Canada since they could not have lawfully wed in Florida or England, where the two partners reside.

...

The government’s hard line has cast sudden doubt on the rights and legal status of couples who wed in Canada after a series of court decisions opened the floodgates to same-sex marriage. The mechanics of determining issues such as tax status, employment benefits and immigration have been thrown into legal limbo.

First of all, let's look at the plaintiffs in this case, who were married in Canada but live in Florida and the UK. Florida does not recognize gay marriage, and the UK has civil partnerships for gay couples but not marriage. It seems self-evident to me that the "rights and legal status" of a Canadian marriage as outlined in Canadian law apply only if you live in Canada. Canada has no power to extend rights to non-citizens who are resident in a foreign jurisdiction that does not recognize the legality of their union. If a foreign couple from such a country wants legal recognition of their married status, they have to live in Canada.

Secondly, the couple is seeking a divorce in Canada, not a marriage. The Federal Divorce Act is crystal clear on who can divorce in this country:

3. (1) A court in a province has jurisdiction to hear and determine a divorce proceeding if either spouse has been ordinarily resident in the province for at least one year immediately preceding the commencement of the proceeding.

The goverment's hands are tied; they cannot hear a divorce case for a foreign same-sex couple (or a heterosexual couple, for that matter) unless at least one spouse has lived in the country for one year. This fact was pointed out to gay couples who flocked to Canada to get married when it became legal to do so here - in fact the CBC warned gay couples of the potential difficulty back in 2009:

Some same-sex couples from the U.S. who got married in Canada are running into trouble getting divorces, according to an Oregon lawyer.

Gay couples have been flocking to cities like Vancouver with its large gay community since same-sex marriage was first legalized in the summer of 2003.

Several of those couples have since approached Oregon lawyer Beth Allen looking for a divorce, but Oregon doesn't recognize gay marriage, or divorce, so they can't get a divorce there, she said.

As well, a residency requirement in Canada's Divorce Act requires one of the two married people to live in this country for a year before a divorce can be granted, and those U.S. states which recognize gay marriage also have residency requirements for divorce.

The news almost always comes as a shock for the couples, Allen told CBC New on Friday morning.

"It's really a horror story for those who went up there hoping for a lifetime of happiness, wanting to break up, and having an extra layer of trouble on that dissolution," said Allen.

Rain Henderson, a Vancouver lawyer and expert on matrimonial law, says marriage application forms should include a new warning for same-sex couples.

"It just talks about you can't marry your uncle, your aunt, your brother or sister kind of thing. It doesn't say be cautious, because you might not be able to get divorced," she said.

Henderson has this advice for gay Americans looking to marry here: "I would say not to do it, because it is, at this point in time, such a procedural bar."

The truth is that same-sex Canadian marriages are NOT legally valid - if you live in a foreign jurisdiction that does not recognize gay marriage. This was true under the previous Liberal regime and is still true today. The Canadian government cannot compel sovereign foreign nations to recognize Canadian laws no matter how enlightened they may be.

The legend of Harper's "Hidden Agenda" refuses to die, though, and clowns like Bob Rae and Olivia Chow are doing back flips to point out that the Tories are now trying to turn back the clock on gay marriage. As reported by the Toronto Star, Rae sanctimoniously intoned that

Harper’s Conservative government was making a move to gut same-sex marriage rights 'by stealth'

and Chow stated that

the Harper government was using a “back door way” to deny the marriages of thousands of gay couples who married in Canada and live abroad in states hostile to gay marriage.

US advice columnist and gay rights advocate Dan Savage fears that his own marriage is in jeopardy and that

If same-sex marriage isn’t legal for foreigners in Canada, if our marriages aren’t valid in Canada, it’s possible that this move by Harper’s government means that couples like us — same-sex couples from WA (Washington state) who married in Canada — are no longer domestic partners under the law here in Washington state. What a headache.

Take a tour through the comments in the Globe and Mail if you have the stomach for it. Here's one example:

What did you expect from Mr. Harper, the right-wing extremist and reactionary!! If he could, he would probably make homosexuality illegal and put women back into the kitchen (you know the old German saying that a woman's domain are "Kinder, Küche, Kirche" (children, kitchen, church). Harper and his so-called conservatives are more akin to the Fascists of 1930s Germany and Italy. They are certainly not interested in democracy, but in heavy-handedly imposing their views and philosophy on others, their constituents. They are also much too much influenced by the American Right, and will likely do anything to get and remain in their good graces.

I hate to spoil a good hate-fest, but the hysterical left is way off base on this one. Harper was apparently unaware of the case now before the courts, and he and Justice Minister Nicholson immediately clarified the Government's position:

Stephen Harper said it was news to him and muttered he was not interested in re-opening the gay marriage debate.

Later Thursday, Nicholson released a written statement to clarify the government “has no intention of reopening the debate on the definition of marriage.”

“I will be looking at options to clarify the law so that marriages performed in Canada can be undone in Canada.”

That's it, folks - show's over. Everyone move along now. No one is trying to make anyone's marriages retroactively illegal, and in fact the government is now apparently going to make divorce easier. That doesn't sound much like a hidden agenda to me, but I'll be the first person to admit it if I'm proven wrong.

UPDATE: In the January 13 National Post:
A clever lawyer, not a hidden agenda
Same-sex union issue 'closed'

FURTHER UPDATE:
Andrew Coyne - "Shoddy reporting and cheap politics create a phony crisis":

You would never know from any of this that in fact there had been no change in policy: that the position advanced by the government lawyer was not new, but merely a statement of settled law. You would never know because neither the Globe nor anyone in the frothing mob it aroused bothered to ask a lawyer — other than the one contesting the case. Had they done so, they would have been told some version of the following:

Normally marriage law is relatively straightforward. Each country defines marriage for itself, and within its borders its citizens are bound by that definition. Where citizens of one country marry in another, however, responsibility is divided between the two, according to the set of common-law rules known as “conflict of laws.”

The “formal validity” of the marriage — that is, whether the vows were exchanged in the appropriate manner— is determined by the laws of the place where the marriage was performed. But the “essential validity” — that is, whether the couple were eligible to get married at all — is determined by the laws of each partner’s “ante-nuptial domicile,” the place they lived before they were married.

There’s no actual controversy on this point. It’s supported by reams of precedent. It’s not some invention of this government, or of Canada for that matter, but is part of the fabric of international law. Nor is it surprising: I’m basing this article in part on a piece by Jeffrey Talpis, professor of law at the University of Montreal, in the Lawyer’s Weekly of Sept. 22, 2006. It’s hard not to sympathize with those who were told when they came to Canada they were legally married. But the fault lies with those who misstated the law then, not those who correctly interpret it now.

STILL FURTHER UPDATE:
Jan. 14 editorial from the National Post: Hidden agenda hysterics:

So why the nervous breakdown? The most charitable answer is that Canada's left is genuinely fearful of an erosion of gay rights in this country. But these people can't all be that dumb. What's more probable is that most of them know the Tories have no desire to revisit the gay marriage issue, and are merely clinging to the notion that the Conservatives are homophobes to score political points.

It won't work, though. Both Paul Martin and Michael Ignatieff, when they led the Liberals, tried repeatedly to sow fears of Tory plans to ban abortions, revive capital punishment and discriminate against gays. None of it happened, and Canadians have shown an admirable resistance to being duped by such baseless claims. The Harper government's alleged homophobia is a cynical, slow-news-day media invention, and casts far more discredit on the government's hysterical critics than the government itself.

The Washington Post hearts Michelle Obama

2012-01-11T20:32:00.008-05:00

Washington Post blogger Judith Howard Ellis gets the vapours and writes a love letter to the US First Lady:

The film characters she reminds me more of include a bunch of the classy black and white women from the past that some Republicans so love to glorify. She ranks with the iconic and trailblazing Ruby Dee, Lena Horne and Suzette Harbin because she is a woman who simply knows how to be. There are also aspects of her that make me think of spirited Katharine Hepburn in Holiday, elegant Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, wise and proud Greer Garson in The Valley of Decision, and adventurous Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday. Michelle Obama is not any of these characters, of course, but bears traces of the universal characteristics these women brought to life. As the first lady said today, she’s “just trying to be me, and I just hope that over time, that people get to know me.”

I'm a fan of Katharine Hepburn. I know Katharine Hepburn. Madam, you're no Katharine Hepburn.

"She's a woman who simply knows how to be"? Good grief.

How gay marriage could lead to the end of humanity

2012-01-11T17:51:00.001-05:00

Jimmy Kimmel explains the Pope's recent pronouncement:

(HT: Towleroad)

Rick Santorum & America's "decaying culture"

2012-01-09T17:32:00.004-05:00

Steve Chapman at Reason points out that Rick Santorum's mission to heal a morally sick America may resonate with religious conservatives, but his claim that social liberals (read feminists, atheists and homosexuals) are destroying the very foundations of America is not supported by facts:

[Santorum] thinks America has been on a downhill slide for many years, thanks to feminism, gay rights, pornography, and other vile intruders. But where is the evidence that the developments cited by Santorum are producing harmful side effects?

In the past couple of decades, most indicators of moral and social health have gotten better, not worse. Crime has plummeted. Teen pregnancy has declined by 39 percent. Abortion rates among adolescents are less than half what they were.

The incidence of divorce is down. As of 2007, 48 percent of high school students had engaged in sex, compared to 54 percent in 1991. What "decaying culture" is he talking about?

It sounds obvious that when people practice a religion that preaches strong morality and responsible conduct, they will behave better than people who follow their own inclinations. But what is obvious is not always true.

...

Does gay marriage undermine the health and stability of heterosexual marriage? Not so you can tell. Massachusetts has the nation's lowest divorce rate. Iowa and Connecticut are also better than most. Vermont and New Hampshire are about average. In the Bible Belt, by contrast, marriages are generally more prone to break up.

Santorum presents himself as a man of faith who insists on confronting stark facts that many people would rather ignore. In fact, in his indictment of tolerance, individual conscience, sexual freedom, and secular morality, he is not telling truths but spinning sanctimonious fairy tales. American culture is not sick, and Santorum is no healer.

Blues for a Saturday Night

2012-01-07T17:00:00.000-05:00

Tonight's selection - an amazing guitar duet by Larry Carlton and Robben Ford:

Jay-Z in Washington

2012-01-03T19:49:00.018-05:00

It's official - the collapse of western civilization is imminent now that both the President of the United States and the House of Representatives Majority Leader have tunes by Jay-Z and Lil' Wayne on their iPods.

President Obama held a press conference recently in which he said goodbye to his personal assistant Reggie Love, who is leaving the White House to attend the Wharton School of Business full time. The President thanked Mr. Love for his service, which included updating his musical tastes:

One thing Love does to perfection is help make the president look hip. He taught Obama how to fist-bump, bought him a silver iPod for his birthday and introduced him to the music of Lil Wayne and Jay-Z. Last year, Obama playfully referred to Love as his "iReggie."

Not to be outdone, Republican Eric Cantor, House Majority Leader, revealed that he too is a fan:

Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and President Obama have butted heads on many legislative policies during the last year, but there’s one thing they can both agree on: they heart rap music.

The House Majority Leader revealed on CBS’ “60 Minutes” on Sunday his (perhaps unexpected) love for a variety of rappers, including Lil' Wayne, Jay-Z, and Wiz Khalifa.

What the hell is going on here? The President of the U.S. and the second most powerful Republican in the House of Representatives are listening to rap music? For those of you out there who are not familiar with Mr. Z's oeuvre, here's a sample of the lyrics from a 2009 track called Ignorant Shit:

This is that ignorant shit you like
Nigga, fuck, shit, ass, bitch, trick, plus ice
C'mon, I got that ignorant shit you love
Nigga, fuck, shit, maricon, puta, and drugs
C'mon, I got that ignorant shit you need
Nigga, fuck, shit, ass, bitch, trick plus weed
I'm only trying to give you what you want
Nigga, fuck, shit, ass, bitch, you like it don't front

Mr. Cantor professes to be a Li'l Wayne fan. Here's a sample of his 1999 release Kisha

Her name's on my beeper
I called her on the Nokia
And told her come pick me up
As soon as I got in the house she got on her knees and grabbed my penis
Ate it up like some peanuts
I said oooohhhh Kisha
This what I got to meet her
She drunk it like a 2 liter
She blow like a pro
Oh no I got to keep her
Told her l'd be back about eleven I'm gone creep her
But don't go to sleep
I got some more meat to feed ya

Or maybe 2007's Time For Us to Fuck is more to Mr. Cantor's taste. Maybe he plays this for his wife Diana (who is a successful lawyer and accountant) during a romantic candlelight dinner before bouncing her booty like a basketball:

I see ya, I see ya
Girl I wanna love you long like ether
I know you want that pita
Girl I say I know you want that pita
That banana like Chikita
I'ma hit it like Derek Jeter
The neighbors gon' think I beat her
I'll throw that dick much deeper
Come be my wide receiver
I'll give that girl a seizure
She forget her boyfriend, amnesia
She wanna ride it, I let her have it
She betta ride it like Danika Patrick
I get behind it, and move her
Like the Heimlich maneuver (OW!)

[CHORUS]

I don't know about you (chea)
But I'm really, really fucked up (chea)
No more liquor in my cup (chea)
I think it's time for us to, time for us to, time for us to fuck (let's go)
I think it's time for us to fuck (let's go)
I think it's time for us to fuck (let's go)
I think it's time for us to, time for us to...

Bounce that booty like a basketball
See, I'm a ball-hog; I don't pass at all (ha-ha)
And now she wanna put her sister on
Now I got twins like "The Whisper Song"
And you could call her Mrs. Me Too
I say I'm on a strict diet, I can only eat you
Lick it lick it, lick it, lick it; I like to
Lick it lick it, lick it lick it..(ha-ha)
I got that Goose in my system
Somebody gon' be my victim
I got patrone in my system,
Somebody gon' be my victim (OW!)

President Obama of course has two daughters, and Mr. Cantor has three children - two sons and a daughter. Are neither of these men worried about the message that the music they are listening to sends to their kids, especially their daughters?

And more to the point, is anyone concerned about the complete degradation of modern culture that is evident in the trajectory of black music? Black Americans have created modern music, from Jazz and Blues to Rock and Roll. In one generation the tradition that gave us Duke Ellington and Chuck Berry has not only degenerated to Jay-Z and Lil' Wayne, but the President of the United States is listening to it on his iPod.

There's no hope.

Blues for New Year's Eve

2011-12-31T17:00:00.004-05:00

Judy Garland sings Happy New Year from her 1957 album Alone.

Happy New Year, Onefineguy.

Architectural crimes against humanity: Kingston, Ontario

2011-12-26T16:15:00.020-05:00

Kingston, Ontario is a beautiful little city on Lake Ontario at the headwaters of the St. Lawrence River. European settlement began here when the French founded Fort Frontenac at the mouth of the Cataraqui River in 1673 - in fact the ruins of the fort can still be seen today. There was a substantial influx of Loyalist refugees in the 1780s and the town was heavily fortified after the War of 1812, resulting in the construction of some of Kingston's most beloved buildings, like Fort Henry and the Martello towers that still guard the harbour.

At one time Kingston was the capital of the united provinces of Upper and Lower Canada and was the home town of Canada's first Prime Minister, John A. Macdonald. Its location at one end of the Rideau Canal and its importance as a military garrison and the home of Queen's University led to a period of prosperity and ambitious building projects. Many, like its magnificent City Hall, have survived and give the modern city's downtown an impressive collection of 19th century architecture.

Unfortunately, Kingston went through a period in the 1960s and 1970s when a lot of hideous modern buildings went up and vandalized the downtown streetscapes. Wandering around today the visitor strolls down streets like this

only to be visually assaulted by buildings like this hotel, built right on the historic waterfront within sight of City Hall and adjacent to a Victorian fire hall:

or this horrendous bank, now abandoned, which squats like a nuclear reactor across from the Market Square, making no attempt to blend into the surrounding streetscape in any harmonious way:

Whole downtown city blocks were razed to put up Brutalist concrete structures like the "Hanson Memorial Parking Garage" near the Market, which I notice has been painted with cute children's art to make it less threatening. I'm not sure what Mr. Hanson did to deserve this memorial. Its pedestrian entrance looks like a maximum security Soviet prison:

But of all the ugly buildings in Kingston, there is one that is head and shoulders above the rest: Princess Towers - a hulking apartment block at the corner of Princess and Division Streets. There are no other high rise buildings in the downtown core, so this structure dominates the city like a medieval castle. Its blank featureless concrete north face confronts visitors travelling south down Division Street from Highway 401 as they enter the downtown business district; it's the first impression that most tourists get of downtown Kingston, somewhat like crossing through the Berlin Wall at Checkpoint Charlie.

It reminds me of the Flak Towers that Hitler built to defend German cities from the Allies during the Second World War, like this one that still stands in Vienna:

The story of the Princess Towers is a cautionary tale. According to the Queen's Encyclopedia it was originally built in 1972 as "Elrond College", an "experimental cooperative student residence" owned by Queen's University but run by the students themselves. It was named after a character from J.R.R. Tolkien's novel Lord of the Rings, which is appropriate since the building looms over Kingston like Mount Doom over Mordor. The Queen's Encyclopedia tells the sad tale:

The idea for Elrond College came from students in the late 1960s, who were fed up with traditional residences, restrictive landlords, and the perennial shortage of housing in Kingston. The co-op, named after a character in the Lord of the Rings whose house was "a cure for weariness, fear, and sadness", was to be a coeducational residence "where the `they' is `you' and the rules are your own," as early promotional material promised. The students secured support from the alma mater society, Queen's administration, and the federal government, and had high hopes for a new era of student housing when the co-op opened in 1972. But the 16-storey project was plagued by financial problems, including a lawsuit levelled by its construction company and a chronic inability to fill its 400 beds. It worked fairly well as a co-op at first, with all residents doing a couple of hours of cleaning and cooking work each week. But the system began to break down in the mid-1970s and the building became increasingly shabby. But what finally brought Elrond to its knees was its inability to pay off its mortgage, thanks again to a persistently high vacancy rate. After a long and winding road of financial misery, the idealistic project closed its doors for good in 1981. The building was sold and it has been a privately-owned apartment block ever since.

It's no wonder there was a chronic inability to fill its beds. Take a look at this building and try to imagine spending a cold Kingston winter or two inside its forbidding ramparts:

The Princess St. entrance alone is enough to depress even the most optimistic Hobbit - how anyone can think that this leads into a building that is "a cure for weariness, fear, and sadness" defies belief. It looks like the entrance to a subway station or a bomb shelter:

The former hippie cooperative is now being run by capitalists as a private enterprise, and instead of a utopian commune where "the `they' is `you' and the rules are your own", the building advertises its convenience and downtown location. Maybe that's a good marketing campaign for all failed socialist experiments - I'll send the idea along to Angela Merkel and her friends at the European Commission.

Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year

2011-12-25T06:00:00.000-05:00

Christmas in Austin Texas, 2010: Jo's Coffee Shop and Taco Stand, South Congress Ave.

Blues for Christmas Eve

2011-12-24T17:00:00.005-05:00

This one's for Onefineguy: Merry Christmas Baby by Etta James

Kim Jong Il's Funky Get Down Juche Party

2011-12-19T22:42:00.003-05:00

In memory of the Dear Leader - some classic North Korean propaganda films set to music.

Blues for a Saturday Night

2011-12-17T17:00:00.001-05:00

Tonight's selection: All Your Love, by John Mayall and the Blues Breakers

The veil is not a choice

2011-12-13T17:44:00.006-05:00

Farzana Hassan, past president of the Canadian Muslim Congress, wrote today in the Huffington Post (!) that she fully supports Immigration Minister Jason Kenney's decision to prohibit women from covering their faces during citizenship oath-taking ceremonies. This should be required reading for all those who worship at the altar of political correctness and can't decide what's the more important shibboleth: feminism or multiculturalism.

Minister Kenney deserves our applause for taking a bold stand against one of ultra-orthodox Islam's most pernicious symbols: The face veil.

...

Indeed newcomers to Canada must embrace gender equality as a core Canadian value. In recognizing the patriarchy behind the veil, Kenny acknowledged that women must make choices freely in an atmosphere of equality and transparency. The face veil must be removed, not just to ensure the integrity of the oath-taking ceremony, but also to affirm the equality of the sexes. And despite what third-wave feminists and multiculturalists assert, the burka is both oppressive and anti-feminist, steeped in patriarchy and control.

It is nonetheless the muticulturalists' love affair with the "exotic" that prevents them from seeing the larger picture about the burka. Their view is obviously predicated on moral relativism that regards all cultures--even the horrendously patriarchal ones--as equal. Third- wave feminists, in particular, assert that women should be free to define their own femininity even if it includes donning the veil. But can a choice be deemed feminist if one adopts a practice that is clearly the result of patriarchal religious edicts?

Regrettably, contemporary feminists continue to support a woman's right to wear the burka. According to them, women have chosen this path of femininity for themselves. Their choices must be respected and any contradictions in their stance must be accepted. To deny a woman the right to wear the burka would mean imposing someone else's standards of equality and freedom.

And herein lies the fallacy. Women who purportedly choose practices that stem from patriarchal interpretations have in fact not defined their femininity. Burka adherents have most certainly taken their cues from chauvinistic and patriarchal religious interpretations and embraced them without question. That women must accept polygamy, that they must veil before strange men, that they must restrict themselves to domestic roles are the result of patriarchal conditioning, rather than women defining these roles for themselves.

Heads are exploding at CBC headquarters at this very moment.

Thank you Peter Kent

2011-12-13T17:38:00.002-05:00

So it's official - Canada has withdrawn from the Kyoto Accord, and it's about time. The New York Times reported on Environment Minister Peter Kent's announcement of the long-anticipated move:

In announcing the decision, government officials indicated that the possibility of huge fines for Canada’s failure to meet emissions targets had also played a role.

“Kyoto, for Canada, is in the past,” the environment minister, Peter Kent, told reporters shortly after returning from South Africa. He added that Canada would work toward developing an agreement that includes targets for developing nations, particularly China and India.

“What we have to look at is all major emitters,” Mr. Kent said.

Under the Kyoto Protocol’s rules, Canada must formally give notice of its intention to withdraw by the end of this year or else face penalties after 2012.

The extent of those penalties, as well as Canada’s ability to redress its inability to meet the treaty’s emission reduction targets, is a matter of some debate.

Mr. Kent said Canada could meet its commitment only through extreme measures, like pulling all motor vehicles from its roads and shutting heat off to every building in the country. He said the Liberal Party had agreed to the treaty “without any regard as to how it would be fulfilled.”

He also said the failure to meet the targets would have cost Canada $14 billion in penalties.

Matt Horne, Director of Climate Change at the Pembina Institute, isn't happy:

“It’s not a surprise that it happened,” Mr. Horne said of the government’s decision to withdraw from the treaty. “But it is a bit of surprise that it happened pretty much as they got off the plane from Durban.”

I love majority governments. Well done, Minister Kent.

Gays, socons and the GOP

2011-12-10T23:21:00.003-05:00

The world economy is circling around the drain, the Middle East is teetering on the edge of the abyss, Europe is collapsing, and what are the Republicans arguing about in the US presidential primary race? Gay marriage and homosexuals in the military.

Rick Perry, trying to revive his sputtering campaign, has recently discovered that homosexuals are the greatest threat to America. He put out an ad last week in which he said "I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm a Christian, but you don't need to be in the pew every Sunday to know that there's something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can't openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school." Really? That's what's wrong with the US?

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a much-lauded speech last week in Geneva to mark International Human Rights Day in which she announced funding for LGBT rights groups overseas. She said:

Now, there is still, as you all know, much more to be done to secure that commitment, that reality, and progress for all people. Today, I want to talk about the work we have left to do to protect one group of people whose human rights are still denied in too many parts of the world today. In many ways, they are an invisible minority. They are arrested, beaten, terrorized, even executed. Many are treated with contempt and violence by their fellow citizens while authorities empowered to protect them look the other way or, too often, even join in the abuse. They are denied opportunities to work and learn, driven from their homes and countries, and forced to suppress or deny who they are to protect themselves from harm.

I am talking about gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people, human beings born free and given bestowed equality and dignity, who have a right to claim that, which is now one of the remaining human rights challenges of our time. I speak about this subject knowing that my own country's record on human rights for gay people is far from perfect. Until 2003, it was still a crime in parts of our country. Many LGBT Americans have endured violence and harassment in their own lives, and for some, including many young people, bullying and exclusion are daily experiences. So we, like all nations, have more work to do to protect human rights at home.

...

It is violation of human rights when people are beaten or killed because of their sexual orientation, or because they do not conform to cultural norms about how men and women should look or behave. It is a violation of human rights when governments declare it illegal to be gay, or allow those who harm gay people to go unpunished. It is a violation of human rights when lesbian or transgendered women are subjected to so-called corrective rape, or forcibly subjected to hormone treatments, or when people are murdered after public calls for violence toward gays, or when they are forced to flee their nations and seek asylum in other lands to save their lives. And it is a violation of human rights when life-saving care is withheld from people because they are gay, or equal access to justice is denied to people because they are gay, or public spaces are out of bounds to people because they are gay. No matter what we look like, where we come from, or who we are, we are all equally entitled to our human rights and dignity.

Perry was outraged by this apparent attack on America's "traditional values". His campaign issued the following statement:

“Just when you thought Barack Obama couldn’t get any more out of touch with America’s values, AP reports his administration wants to make foreign aid decisions based on gay rights.

“This administration’s war on traditional American values must stop.

“I have proposed a foreign aid budget that starts at zero. From that zero baseline, we will consider aid requests based solely on America’s national security interests. Promoting special rights for gays in foreign countries is not in America’s interests and not worth a dime of taxpayers’ money.

“But there is a troubling trend here beyond the national security nonsense inherent in this silly idea. This is just the most recent example of an administration at war with people of faith in this country. Investing tax dollars promoting a lifestyle many Americas of faith find so deeply objectionable is wrong.

“President Obama has again mistaken America’s tolerance for different lifestyles with an endorsement of those lifestyles. I will not make that mistake.”

This is incredible. The Republicans are facing off against Barack Obama in eleven months, and they seriously think that now is the time to bring up gay marriage, Don't Ask Don't Tell and the so-called "war with people of faith"? Here's what blogger Bill Quick has to say about this:

Job number one: Fix Washington so that it is no longer actively trying to destroy the United States of America. Job number one-point-five: Defeat Barack Obama and his party as the first act in fixing Washington so it no longer…etc.

Socons tend to fixate on their own issues and miss the big picture. Because abortion and gay marriage are absolutely critical to their political views, they think they are to everybody’s belief system. But they aren’t. Here’s where the American voter ranks them currently on their list of major concerns: Social issues, two percent. Gay issues, one percent. And so on.

Any politician who thinks he or she is going to ride those issues to victory in today’s climate is simply delusional about what today’s climate really is. And their supporters are projecting their concerns onto the big screen of their desire, which doesn’t reflect the reality of the day at all.

...

The prospect of hanging focuses the mind wonderfully. And the national mind has felt the noose tightening around its collective neck for several years now. Angel-on-the-head-of-a-pin arguments about abortion, or sweeping hysteria about gays destroying the institution of marriage are minuscule distractions when you’re faced with possibly permanent unemployment, bankruptcy, negative home ownership, and a government that seems hell-bent on making your pain worse, not better.

The world's on the brink of catastrophe and the Republicans are arguing about gay rights. Good grief.

Blues for a Saturday Night

2011-12-10T17:00:00.001-05:00

Tonight's selection: Tobacco Road by Spooky Tooth (1968)

Christie Blatchford infuriates me

2011-12-10T11:25:00.008-05:00

I have a love/hate relationship with Christie Blatchford. I think she is one of Canada's best reporters, and I was delighted when she recently returned to the pages of the National Post. She has a gutsy, no-holds-barred irreverent attitude that is unbelievably refreshing in the politically correct hot house environment of Canada's major news media. She frequently slaughters sacred cows and poses the questions that everyone is thinking but no one has the nerve to ask. Her columns on the terrorist attacks on 9-11 and the native occupation of Caledonia are unmatched.

Take her coverage of the Shafia honour-killing trial currently under way in Kingston, for example:

Mr. Shafia, in addition to being an exemplary father, if only by his own measure, is also a shameless brown-noser (“the police in this country is like family,” he said once cheerfully), compulsively flowery (“Dear lady” and “Respected lady” is how he addressed Ms. Lacelle), and the sort of fellow who is able to claim, when faced with a mound of pictures of himself with a chocolate-covered face, that he never touches the stuff, never has and never will.

However, she frequently has a tortured writing style that drives me nuts and makes me wonder what's wrong with her editor. She has a particular fondness for long-winded run-on sentences, like this one from her column Toronto, City of Sissies in today's Post:

This was about the time that Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty was all over the airwaves, with his anti-bullying crackdown, and poor old Doug Ford, a Toronto councillor whose brother Rob just happens to be the city mayor, was caught out (by the Toronto Star, of course, the newspaper in such a permanent state of nervous Nellie-dom about the Fords, forever crying in front-page headlines “The world is ending! Again!”, that it renders the boy who cried wolf a reticent little beggar by comparison) shilling for the Ultimate Fighting Championship, or UFC, which of course was made legal in the province only this year by, wait for it, the government of Premier McGuinty.

Whew. Reading that is like going nine rounds with a prize fighter - I'm exhausted and need a drink. There are so many parentheses, quotation marks and subordinate clauses that I feel like I've followed a trail of bread crumbs through the woods by the time I reach the end.

Christie, on the off chance that you read this: I think you're great but you're making me crazy.

Send in the gay Marines

2011-12-07T16:37:00.009-05:00

On September 20 the Obama administration ended the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy which prevented openly gay men and women from serving in the US military. This toxic policy meant that thousands of gay people in the military were forced into the closet, in constant fear of being outed. Many people with valuable skills and years of expensive training were kicked out of the armed forces when their sexual orientation was revealed.

Conservative critics warned that ending DADT would have catastrophic effects on US military strength, with many warning of the pending calamity of straight soldiers having to shower with their gay comrades. Rick Perry, Governor of Texas and candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, made it clear that he was against repeal of DADT and would be "comfortable" reinstating it if he became President:

Rick Perry said it was "irresponsible" for President Barack Obama to repeal the "don't ask, don't tell" policy that banned gays from serving openly in the military.
In an ABC News/Yahoo News interview, Perry called don't ask, don't tell a "workable policy." The Texas governor and Republican presidential candidate accused Obama of playing politics with the military.

"(Obama) wanted to make a political statement, using the men and women in the military as a tool for that," the Republican presidential candidate told ABC's Christiane Amanpour. "I truly believe that he did it to respond to his political base."
But Perry refused to say whether he would reinstate the policy if he were elected president. He told ABC/Yahoo that he would be "comfortable" going back to the policy.

Perry used the DADT issue to throw some red meat to his Christian base in this TV ad:

It was in this context that I recently read a touching blog post written by Captain Matthew Phelps, a ten-year veteran of the US Marine Corps. DADT was making his life a living hell, and when it was finally repealed his life changed drastically for the better. He writes a particularly moving account of taking a gay male friend as his date to the Marine Corps Birthday Ball in San Diego on November 10, knowing that he and his friend would be the only male couple there. Anyone who doubts that gay men and women can't serve effectively in the armed forces and be accepted by their straight comrades should read his account in its entirety. He concludes with these words:

I was overwhelmed by the whole occasion, and happily surprised at how well everything had gone and how supportive everyone had been. There was one particular moment, however, that struck me and I’ll never forget it. Brandon and I were standing in the middle of the room, him handsomely as ever in his suit after his first Marine Corps event, me in my dress blues on my 236th birthday, surrounded by an amazing group of gay and straight civilians and Marines, and I looked at him. We had survived a night I thought would never come, and with it behind us there would be many more: maybe for us, but definitely for all those who will come after we have been long forgotten. I thought to myself as I looked in his eyes that we’d done it, and I kissed him.

Bravo, Captain Phelps.

Women drivers

2011-12-02T05:51:00.002-05:00

The reason for Saudi Arabia's law preventing women from driving cars is revealed: according to the Daily Mail, allowing women to drive will cause people to turn gay and will mean "no more virgins" in the kingdom:

Repealing a ban on women drivers in Saudi Arabia would result in ‘no more virgins’, the country’s religious council has warned.
A ‘scientific’ report claims relaxing the ban would also see more Saudis - both men and women - turn to homosexuality and pornography.
The startling conclusions were drawn by Muslim scholars at the Majlis al-Ifta’ al-A’ala, Saudi Arabia’s highest religious council, working in conjunction with Kamal Subhi, a former professor at the King Fahd University.

...

The report warns that allowing women to drive would ‘provoke a surge in prostitution, pornography, homosexuality and divorce’.
Within ten years of the ban being lifted, the report’s authors claim, there would be ‘no more virgins’ in the Islamic kingdom.
And it pointed out ‘moral decline’ could already be seen in other Muslim countries where women are allowed to drive.
In the report Professor Subhi described sitting in a coffee shop in an unnamed Arab state.
‘All the women were looking at me,’ he wrote. ‘One made a gesture that made it clear she was available... this is what happens when women are allowed to drive.’

You can't make this stuff up.

Waiting for a response from the NDP [crickets chirping]

2011-11-30T17:47:00.011-05:00

Back in October, a group of Conservative MPs, including Foreign Minister John Baird and Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, recorded anti-bullying videos for Dan Savage's It Gets Better campaign, which is designed to help gay teenagers deal with homophobic bullying. The MPs made the videos in response to the suicide of Ottawa teenager Jamie Hubley. There was considerable criticism at the time and many, including Dan Savage himself, were outraged that presumably homophobic Conservatives dared to weigh in on the issue.

In particular, NDP MP Randall Garrison, the NDP critic for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender issues, drew on deep wells of contempt and snapped that

... the Conservatives' video "fails to understand the basic concept" of the campaign, adding that message only works if delivered by openly gay people.

"And there's a shortage on the Conservative side," he said. "You can't do these (videos) if you're not an out, gay person."

Fast forward to Queen's Park, where today Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, a Liberal, released his own "It Gets Better" video:

Today, Premier Dalton McGuinty delivered a simple message to Ontario students who are bullied or feel alone: it gets better, and we can make it better, together.

The Premier met students at L'Amoreaux Collegiate Institute in Toronto, where he also released his "It Gets Better" video, which encourages students, teachers, parents and community members to do their part to help end bullying and intolerance.

I assume that Mr. McGuinty, married, father of four, is not an out gay person. Over to you, Mr. Garrison.

Review of the century

2011-11-30T17:22:00.002-05:00

Read this review by Matt Cartmill of Donna Haraway's book Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science and stand in awe of this epic slapdown:

This is a book full of vaporous, French-intellectual prose that makes Teilhard de Chardin sound like Ernest Hemingway by comparison; but that is not a criticism, because the author likes that sort of prose and has taken lessons in how to write it, and she thinks that plain, homely speech is part of a conspiracy to oppress the poor.

This is a book that clatters around in a dark closet of irrelevancies for 450 pages before it bumps accidentally into its index and stops; but that is not a criticism, either, because its author finds it gratifying and refreshing to bang unrelated facts together as a rebuke to stuffy minds. This book infuriated me; but that is not a defect in it, because it is supposed to infuriate people like me, and the author would have been happier still if I had blown out an artery. In short, this book is flawless, because all its deficiencies are deliberate products of art. Given its assumptions, there is nothing here to criticize. The only course open to a reviewer who dislikes this book as much as I do is to question its author’s fundamental assumptions—which are big-ticket items involving the nature and relationships of language, knowledge, and science.

(HT: Improbable Research)

What's happened to Britain?

2011-11-29T17:05:00.004-05:00

Compare and contrast:

2011: Prime Minister David Cameron responding to the storming of the British Embassy in Tehran:

The Iranian government must recognize that there will be serious consequences for failing to protect our staff. We will consider what these measures should be in the coming days.

1843: Sir Charles James Napier, British Governor of Bombay & Commander of British forces in India, to holdout enemy leaders who refused to surrender after the Battle of Miani:

Come here instantly. Come here at once and make your submission, or I will in a week tear you from the midst of your village and hang you.

Brains behind Occupy Wall Street disappointed by the "loony left"

2011-11-27T10:16:00.012-05:00

Last week, Kalle Lasn, editor of Adbusters magazine and the man behind the campaign that launched the Occupy Wall Street movement, expressed his disappointment in the quality of the protesters who showed up at Occupy camps in Canada and the US. In an interview with CJME radio, he said:

"I must admit, there is something kind of special about Canada," Lasn said in a telephone interview. "Somehow I found that many of the things that were happening in the U.S., there seems to be more vigour and spunk in some of the occupations there."

Lasn's impressions of the comparative lassitude stemmed from visits to the Occupy site in his adopted home town of Vancouver, which _ along with other urban campsites in Toronto, Montreal, Quebec and Edmonton _ was forcibly shut down by city authorities earlier this week.

While the site attracted its share of energized, politically engaged youth who the Estonian-born Lasn describes as "the new left," he also noted a stronger presence from fringe elements that has given left wing movements a bad name in the past, he said.

"I just had a feeling that there was a little bit too much of the loony left there," Lasn said. "I had a feeling that we needed more of the young, new-left spunk that I felt was happening in Zuccotti Park. I didn't see all that much of it here in Vancouver."

"New-left spunk"? So that's what that smell was. Mr. Lasn naturally blamed the collapse of the movement on "the mainstream media":

Lasn is quick to lay much of the blame on mainstream media, who he accuses of depicting the protesters as lawless rebels and their camp sites as dens of iniquity.

By zeroing in on incidents of drug use and crime _ which take place in staggering numbers every day _ Canada's news outlets failed to communicate the key message at the heart of the "Occupy movement," he said.

"The Canadian media really dropped the ball on this one," Lasn said. "Instead of seeing it as a movement of young people fighting for a different kind of future, which is so beautiful and so valid, they basically saw it as a pesky irritation that had to be got rid of."

You've got to be kidding me. The mainstream media handled the Occupy protests with kid gloves and hyped it beyond belief. Most reporters filed breathless stories like they were calling in from Tiananmen Square. If it hadn't been for bloggers and a few outlets like Sun News and the National Post, we would have learned very little about the filth, violence and substance abuse that was happening.

I personally visited two Occupy camps in Ottawa and Kingston. I saw for myself what was going on and I would have been really surprised if I had relied solely on the CBC, CTV or the Toronto Star for my information.

I have news for Kalle Lasn: the loony left IS the new left.

Time to end Ontario's beer cartel

2011-11-26T19:51:00.010-05:00

Most beer drinkers in Ontario don't realize that the neighbourhood beer retailer with the folksy name "The Beer Store" is not a branch of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, nor is it run by any government agency at all. It is in fact a legal cartel run by Ontario's three largest brewers: Molson's (now owned by US brewer Coors), Labatt's (now a branch of Anheuser Busch InBev of Belgium) and Sleeman's (owned by Japanese brewer Sapporo). It jealously guards its monopoly and furiously resists attempts to allow competition, and it's not above strong-arming small craft brewers to do so.

In 2008, The Beer Store (TBS) harassed the Brick Brewing Company of Waterloo and threatened to cut off its supply of industry-standard long-necked bottles if it didn't stop bottling its Red Cap beer in distinctive stubby bottles. This prompted a lengthy and expensive court case which Brick eventually won:

The fight over the stubby is just one example of how tough it is to compete in a retail distribution system owned by some of his biggest rivals, Brickman told the Star earlier this summer. His comments came in an interview for a series examining the ownership structure at The Beer Store.

Though licensed by the province, the retail chain that accounts for more than 80 per cent of all beer sales in Ontario is owned and operated by Canada's three largest brewers, which in turn are foreign dominated.

They are Labatt, owned by Belgium's InBev SA, Molson, part of U.S.-based Molson Coors, and Sleeman, now owned by Sapporo of Japan.

Together they control $2.5 billion in beer sales in the province, with little government involvement.

So, when Brick got into a fight with The Beer Store over its use of the non-standard bottle, it had nowhere to go but court to complain – an expensive route for a small firm, Brickman noted.

"Our beef is that the owners (of the store) have their own agenda," he said.

That same year TBS squeezed the Beau's All Natural Brewing Company, a craft brewer in Vankleek Hill near Ottawa. Beau's sold its signature Lug Tread Lager in bottles with ceramic swing tops. Although Beau's didn't sell its beer at Beer Store outlets (opting for the LCBO, the only other legal retail outlet in the province), customers were returning the empties to the Beer Store and getting a refund. However, since Beau's was not carried by the Beer Store, TBS refused to give the company its bottles back. Beau's eventually set up a charity bottle drive through Operation Go Home, an Ottawa based youth shelter, just to get its bottles returned.

Beau's is again in the sights of the beer monopoly because it had the temerity to set up a home delivery service (proceeds were again being donated to Operation Go Home) which last week ran afoul of Ontario's Alcohol and Gaming Commission. Steve Beauchesne of Beau's explains:

Today we launched Buy Your Beau’s Online, our project with Operation Come Home to deliver beer to people’s homes in Ottawa, and promptly had the service effectively shut down by the AGCO.

That’s right, after less than a day of operation, BYBO has been closed, after another brewery (we weren’t told which one) complained. The complaint has nothing to do with the service or the fact that at-risk youth were involved, but over a technicality involving what I believe to be a typo in the regulations around home beer delivery services.

Our retail store operates as an authorized beer store by the LCBO, but the regulation around home delivery uses the wording ‘operated’ instead of ‘authorized,’ which is how it is worded to allow us to sell to special occasion permit holders, and retail customers. It is interesting to note that the Beer Store, which is not operated by the LCBO or government is somehow allowed to sell to home delivery services.

So…

No specialty beer delivered to our Ottawa customers.
No employment for homeless youth, to get them off the street.
No additional revenue for Operation Come Home.

What’s really got me irked about this situation is the complete arbitrariness of the regulation that is being used to kill a social enterprise designed to do good for the community and the malicious behaviour by another brewery in this province.

The Beer Store is a retail outlet owned by three breweries. Why would they be allowed to sell to a home delivery service and Beau’s (or any other brewery) not be? It doesn’t make any sense, it’s anti-competitive and it restricts choice to the residents of this province.

I know that there are a lot of cut-throat competitive tactics used by some of the less honourable members of the brewing community, but taking a job from a homeless youth to thwart us is beyond reprehensible.

I’m disappointed that the AGCO has decided to act this way, using the letter and not the spirit of the law to guide their decision-making, but ultimately I understand that they may not have had a choice once the complaint was lodged. I would have rathered more consultation from them or that they refused the delivery license application when they were informed how the service would work. If that had happened, at least Corey and Kyle, the two youths who had been hired to start this service, wouldn’t have had their hopes lifted and then let down in such a dramatic way.

I’m simply aghast, though that another brewery instigated this.

I’m really disappointed that this service is unfortunately going to be shut down.

I’m sorry to the youth who have been dealt yet another misfortune, to our customers who were looking forward to gaining better access to our beer and to other breweries who probably would have been able to use similar models to compete better in this Province.

Beer purchases are tightly controlled in Ontario. Beer drinkers can get their suds from the Beer Store, a cartel run by the three big brewers and regulated by the Ontario government, or from the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, a liquor monopoly run by the Ontario government. This crazy system was set up in 1927 after Prohibition ended to placate the nervous Nellies of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and almost a century later we're still under its thumb. What kind of civilized country still treats its alcohol consumers like crazed underage teenagers and permits a cartel run by three foreign multinationals to control the beer supply? The province has a paternalistic assumption that the citizens of Ontario are not mature or responsible enough to handle wider more unrestricted access to alcohol. It's embarrassing and insulting.

By the way, if you want to sign a petition urging the Ontario government to end the Beer Store's monopoly, go here. Free the oppressed microbrewers of Ontario! And if you're in the Ottawa area, pick up a case of Beau's Lug Tread Lager - it's really good.

Blues for a Saturday Night

2011-11-26T17:00:00.000-05:00

Tonight's selection: The Messiah Will Come Again, by Roy Buchanan

Gay marriage & the BC polygamy court decision

2011-11-25T19:03:00.003-05:00

It's not often I get to gloat in this blog and say "I told you so", but I'm going to indulge a little today. I saw the recent BC Supreme Court decision on the Bountiful polygamists coming, and I was correct in saying that allowing gay marriage in Canada did not set a precedent that inevitably lead to legalized polygamy.

Way back in 2007 I responded to an article by David Warren in the Ottawa Citizen in a post I called The polygamy red herring. Warren had written that

polygamy follows "multiple parentage" as night follows day. It likewise followed from same-sex "marriage" -- for if the institution cannot be restricted to one man and one woman, how otherwise can it be restricted?

...

Long ago, we realized the marriage formula "one man, one woman" must secure the hearth of our settled culture -- that no other arrangement could possibly end well. The centuries pass, and we manage to forget why we came to that conclusion, and start tinkering with it again. Civilized men and women have their own taboos -- founded in reason and historical experience -- and the one against polygamy is (or was) among the most powerful. Cross the essential taboo lines, dare others to cross, and the superstructure of any society comes down, whether that society be civilized or primitive.

...

Wake up, gentle reader. If you don't want polygamy in Canada, you had better start making a loud noise. For the internal enemies of our civilization have laid all the groundwork for this coup de grace.

In my response, I wrote:

Even rabid libertarians acknowledge that not all individual rights are worthy of protection. John Stuart Mill, in his great essay “On Liberty”, laid the framework that has guided most western common law rights traditions: he wrote that individuals are entitled to life, liberty and property rights only so far as the exercise of those rights does not harm the rights of others. You may have the right to keep plutonium in your garden shed, but if it makes your neighbours sick or you are planning to build a weapon of mass destruction with it, then the state is justified in restricting this right to property.

It is difficult, in my mind, to argue that gay marriage infringes on the rights of anyone else. If a homosexual couple gets married, I can’t see how this significantly harms heterosexual couples or society at large. Similarly, if the state recognizes that a child has three legal parents, I don’t find the argument that this harms children very convincing. I think it makes sense from a libertarian perspective for the state to recognize that there is no valid reason for people not to exercise their liberty in this regard.

However, a very strong case can be made that polygamy does create harm. First of all, let us recognize that in societies that practice polygamy, it almost always means that one man has multiple wives, and not the other way around. In a population that statistically has a 50-50 split between males and females, and where males take multiple wives, the logical result is that many young men are prevented from taking wives of their own. The result in these communities is that surplus young men are frequently ostracized or banished from their communities against their will. This phenomenon is well documented in polygamist communities in the U.S. and Canada. This alone would justify the state’s intervention in limiting a man’s right to take multiple wives.

Furthermore, polygamist communities have a disturbingly high rate of incest, child abuse and wife battering. In Utah, where approximately 2% of the population are practicing polygamists in spite of a legal ban on plural marriage, the Los Angeles Times reported in 2001 that polygamist communities had extraordinarily high levels of these crimes, as well as widespread reliance on welfare, unusual levels of child poverty, wide-ranging tax fraud, limited education, and over-taxed public services. It is difficult to prosecute polygamy in Utah because the victims in these cases rarely press charges and it is almost impossible to compel witnesses to testify. However, there is no doubt in most people’s minds (including most Mormons) that polygamy should be illegal - the harm it produces far outweighs the rights to liberty of its practitioners. The state is fully justified in prohibiting it.

Opponents of gay marriage (and now “multiple parents”) argue that once the precedent for “non-traditional” family arrangements has been set, there is now no argument for continuing to insist that other non-traditional practices like polygamy remain illegal. Nonsense. The state has imposed limits on heterosexual marriage for centuries; the courts have upheld traditional taboos against marrying your mother, or your sister, or your dog. It is a legal requirement for heterosexuals to limit the number of their spouses to one. Homosexual marriage has the same legal limits - the centuries-old common law traditions have not been overturned, they have been extended, to include gay couples.

Gay marriage is now legal because its opponents could not muster up enough support for the argument that it caused harm to society. Fair enough. However, it would be difficult to make the same argument for polygamy, and the courts can and will recognize this. In my opinion, the moral floodgates have not been opened - everyone take a pill and relax.

Justice Bauman of the BC Supreme Court apparently has a similar opinion:

Chief Justice Robert Bauman wrote that Section 293 of the Criminal Code, the law banning polygamy, does, in fact, run counter to sections of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In particular, he made reference to Section 2, which protects such fundamental freedoms as freedom of religion, and Section 7, which guarantees the autonomy of the individual.

He ruled, however, that the ban remains constitutional under Section 1 - allowing "reasonable limits" on absolute rights that can be "demonstrably justified" - because the harm that flows from polygamous relationships outweighs any violation of constitutionally protected rights.

Section 1 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms states that in Canada, rights (including the right to religious freedom) are not absolute:

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.

As reported by Lorne Gunter of the National Post, Justice Bauman clearly outlined the justification for limiting the religious rights of the Bountiful polygamists:

Yet as B.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert Baumann ruled on Wednesday, in upholding the constitutionality of Canada's anti-polygamy laws, "there is no such thing as 'good polygamy.'" While in theory polygamy should be an individual right, nowhere - at least not in North America - does polygamy exist without harm to children and mental damage to spouses. Therefore, Judge Baumann reasoned, while banning polygamy violates the religious rights of fundamentalist Mormons, that right is outweighed by the harm the practice necessarily does to women and children.

"The harms associated with the practice are endemic; they are inherent," the judge wrote in a 357-page decision. "This conclusion is critical because it supports the view that the harms found in polygynous societies are not simply the product of individual misconduct; they arise inevitably out of the practice." It is simply impossible to allow polygamy without condoning abuse.

Gay marriage has none of the inherent harms associated with it that polygamy does; I can't think of any situation where anyone would be coerced into a gay marriage (well, none that wouldn't similarly apply to heterosexual marriage) nor can I see any realistic harm to society at large that automatically ensues from allowing gay couples to marry.

Before Justice Baumann's ruling, the Bountiful case had skittish politicians paralyzed with indecision. We shouldn't confuse a failure of will on the part of the authorities to enforce the law with a collapse of the moral order brought on by gay marriage. Even though the ruling pointed out potential problems and loopholes in Canada's anti-polygamy laws and is likely to be appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada, there is no excuse now for governments not to act against the criminal offence of polygamy in Bountiful and elsewhere. Failure to enforce the law now can only result from spineless politicians trying to avoid confrontation. Don't blame gay couples for this.

Literally ...

2011-11-22T17:44:00.003-05:00

One of my pet peeves is the mis-use of the word "literally" in conversation. It's proper meaning is "actually; without exaggeration or inaccuracy,as in the city was literally destroyed." However, its current usage equates it with "virtually" or "in effect" - a sloppy mistake that must be stopped at all costs.

Rob Lowe uses the confusion to comic effect in the TV sitcom "Parks and Recreation" - his character Chris Traeger uses the word "literally" as a modifier in almost every sentence ("My body is literally a finely-tuned machine"). However, I don't think most viewers get the joke, that his body is not ACTUALLY a machine. It's funny to most people just because of its repetitive use.

Over to the talking heads at MSNBC. Commentator Mika Brezinski was driven to rant in spectacular fashion the other day by Newt Gingrich's comment that the people at Occupy Wall Street should "get a job, right after you take a bath". Practically hyperventilating, she said:

I'm so disgusted by that that something horrible is going to come . . . I, I, am I alone here? Am I over-reacting? I'm sickened by that . . . It's fair to say he's in the 1%, correct? He's telling the 99% to take a bath and get a job? Really? Really, I wonder how they do that right now. How, given the state of this country, how anyone's going to just get a job and take a bath. Who is this man? Who does he think he is? And why is he surging in the polls? I don't get it. I mean,to hear Newt Gingrich standing on literally his high horse, after taking advantage of the system, cashing in, being the biggest, literally the biggest hypocrite in the Repubican field, probably in politics today. The biggest hypocrite. And then to cast aspersions and to speak down to these people as if--plghhh--they should be flipped away? It's disgusting. It's absolutely disgusting. It's a very angry way to start the show. I'm extremely sorry. But it's the first time I'd seen that. And it literally made my skin crawl. I can't believe he resonates.

I'm trying to picture Newt Gingrich, who's literally the biggest hypocrite, literally standing on a high horse, making Ms Brezinski's skin literally crawl. It actually makes me shudder.

Russian city may enact draconian anti-gay law

2011-11-22T17:21:00.002-05:00

The municipal government of St Petersburg, Russia's second-largest city, is one step closer to enacting a harsh new law prohibiting "gay propaganda" which may have the effect of silencing the city's gay citizens:

The bill, which St. Petersburg’s city assembly passed nearly unanimously on the first of three readings on Wednesday, effectively bans public events by LGBTI people and organizations under the pretext of protecting minors.

If enacted, the law would allow authorities to impose fines of up to the equivalent of US$1,600 for “public actions aimed at propaganda of sodomy, lesbianism, bisexuality, and transgenderism among minors.”

“This bill is a thinly veiled attempt to legalize discrimination against lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people in Russia’s second-biggest city,” said Nicola Duckworth, Amnesty International’s Europe and Central Asia Programme Director.

“The notion that LGBTI rights activists are somehow converting Russia’s youth through ‘propaganda’ would be laughable, if the potential effects of this new law weren’t so dangerous and wide-reaching.”

Local LGBTI rights activists have blasted the law, saying it will provide legal cover for banning any of their actions, including the distribution of information leaflets or even actions against homophobia.

Under the measure, freedom of assembly and expression for LGBTI groups would be prohibited anywhere children might be present. This would rule out nearly all public events carried out by or on behalf of LGBTI people and organizations.

The publication of anything relating to LGBTI rights or providing assistance or advice – including informative leaflets as well as publications in the media and on the internet – would also be severely curtailed.

Other Russian cities like Moscow have planned legislation to ban “propaganda for homosexuality”, while Arkhangelsk and the region of Riazan have already introduced such legislation.

Although consensual same-sex activity was decriminalized in Russia in 1993, LGBTI people still face widespread discrimination and violence.

LGBTI activists’ attempts to organize Pride marches, cultural festivals and other events in major cities, including St. Petersburg, have frequently been met with official red tape and violence from anti-gay groups, among them people associating themselves with the Orthodox Church. Violent attacks against LGBTI activists often go unpunished.

The Washington Post reports:

Russia’s top gay rights activist on Thursday condemned a bill passed in the country’s second largest city that prohibits “propaganda of homosexuality” to minors, warning it could be used to ban gay protest rallies.

Nikolai Alexeyev of the GayRussia.ru group described the legislation tentatively approved by lawmakers in St. Petersburg as a “disgrace.”

The bill was proposed by the dominant United Russia party and passed Wednesday by a 27 to 1 vote, with one abstention, in the first of three required readings. It calls for a fine of up to $1,600 for “public actions aimed at propaganda of pederasty, lesbianism, bisexuality, and transgenderism among minors.”

Alexeyev said the bill could become “the main legal reason to deny any public actions by the LGBT community.”

“It theoretically allows the ban of anything anywhere where kids could be present,” he told The Associated Press.

This is yet more evidence that Russia is sliding further into totalitarianism. If you would like to add your name to a petition of support for Russian activists fighting this bill, go here.

Occupy Kingston: This is what a pathetic protest looks like

2011-11-20T19:17:00.021-05:00

I was in Kingston, Ontario this afternoon taking a stroll downtown on a beautiful fall day when I stumbled on the Occupy Kingston encampment in Confederation Park in front of Kingston's beautiful 19th century city hall. I had such fun talking to the folks at Occupy Ottawa a few weeks ago that I thought I would wander over and see how the revolution was going.

Kingston is a city of about 150 000 people (including the surrounding suburbs) at the headwaters of the St Lawrence River and home to Queen's University (approximately 15 000 students) and the Royal Military College of Canada. It is a town of remarkable beauty with a distinguished history; it was once the capital of the united provinces of Upper and Lower Canada. I was curious to see how a movement to bring down the capitalist system would fare in this establishment town; I was confident the lefty Sociology and Post-colonial Studies students at Queen's could be counted on to put on a decent show.

Check out their website - there's the standard boiler-plate agitprop about being part of the world-wide "Occupy" movement that sounds quite impressive:

From America to Asia, from Africa to Europe, people are rising up to claim their rights and demand a true democracy. Now it is time for all of us to join in a global non violent protest.

The ruling powers work for the benefit of just a few, ignoring the will of the vast majority and the human and environmental price we all have to pay. This intolerable situation must end.

United in one voice, we will let politicians, and the financial elites they serve, know it is up to us, the people, to decide our future. We are not goods in the hands of politicians and bankers who do not represent us.

On October 15th, we will meet on the streets to initiate the global change we want. We will peacefully demonstrate, talk and organize until we make it happen.

They've been at it for over a month - surely the movement has grown to the point where the citizens of Kingston can no longer ignore it. I wandered over expecting to encounter a raucous crowd of malcontents, but that was far from the case. In fact, when I spotted their weird igloo made of fiberglass tarpaulins, I thought it was maybe a construction excavation that had been covered over for the weekend.

This couldn't be the Kingston cell of the infamous Occupy Wall Street movement, could it? I walked around the structure and finally found a sign that said that this was in fact ground zero for the Kingston Revolution (even if they couldn't spell "Kingston" properly).

The "People's Tent" is apparently sponsored by organized labour - there was a United Steelworkers flag flying over it and a banner from the Ontario Federation of Labour taped to one side. Steelworkers of the world, unite!

The Occupiers also apparently have a problem with WalMart:

I would love to have talked with the protesters about how the destruction of WalMart would help the working class, or how the hobbling of giant corporations like Stelco and Dofasco would benefit the Steelworkers of Canada, but I couldn't find anyone to talk to. There was no one around. Not a soul. The camp was empty. In fact the only people anywhere near the encampment were a young couple who were taking pictures of each other in front of the People's Tent. This is apparently now the main function of Occupy Kingston - a backdrop for tourists to use to update their Facebook photo pages.

This is the movement that is sweeping the land? This is what the mainstream media have been breathlessly and uncritically reporting as North America's "Arab Spring moment"? Pathetic.

My advice to the Mayor of Kingston is to leave this camp in place to expose it as the sham that it is. Trying to get a court injunction against the occupiers and sending the police in to clear out the tents will only feed the media narrative and give the occupiers undeserved publicity. Wait until the winter arrives in earnest and the tarpaulins collapse under the weight of a Kingston winter, and then send in the Parks and Recreation department in the spring to clean up the mess.

Blues for a Saturday Night

2011-11-19T17:00:00.000-05:00

Tonight's feature: I Had A Dream (Shadow of Love) by Gary Moore

This is how it's done, folks

2011-11-14T17:30:00.003-05:00

In New York, a former NYPD cop teaches a lesson to an Occupy Wall Street protester:

Meet New York’s newest hero.

Kevin Hiltunen, a former NYPD officer, yesterday grabbed an Occupy Wall Street demonstrator by the collar and dragged him out of a Queens school where he’d been heckling US Rep. Bob Turner at the congressman’s swearing-in ceremony.

“I guess you could say I sorted him out,” said Hiltunen, 48, his jacket and tie barely mussed after dragging the scruffy protester out on his rear end.

Blues for a Saturday Night

2011-11-12T18:40:00.002-05:00

I'm starting a new feature here at Diogenes Borealis, mainly as a way to store links to great music, but also to share my love of the blues. Tonight, enjoy "Maggot Brain" by Funkadelic:

Down with the LCBO

2011-11-09T20:30:00.006-05:00

When I was a university student in Ontario in the 1970s the only place to legally buy liquor was downtown at a single run-down LCBO store. Buying liquor there was what I imagine shopping at the GUM department store must have been like in the Soviet Union - there were no products on display, no pictures or advertisements, just row after row of lists of various types of booze available in various bottle sizes. You had to find the stuff you wanted on the list and use a little stubby pencil to fill out an official purchase order with your name, address and the serial number and quantity of hooch you wanted. You then guiltily handed the PO to a crusty guy behind a wicket who perused your order, looked you up and down and then, sighing, went into a back room and eventually brought out your purchase in a brown paper bag. When the whole sordid transaction was complete, you snuck out of the store feeling like you'd just been caught by your dad reading dirty magazines.

Thankfully that humiliating experience is now history in Ontario, but the provincial government still maintains a stranglehold on the sale of most types of wine and liquor, and the Liquor Control Board of Ontario stubbornly defends its monopoly while touting its mandate to be a "socially responsible, performance-driven and profitable retailer, engaging our customers in a discovery of the world of beverage alcohol through enthusiastic, courteous and knowledgeable service." This may be a laudable goal, but is it really the government's role to control the retail sale of alcohol rather than just regulate it?

The LCBO's conversion to "enthusiastic, courteous and knowledgeable service" while "engaging customers in a discovery of the world of beverage alcohol" may be sincere, but it's damned inconvenient. In the village where I live (population 3000) there is a tiny LCBO outlet that has only enough shelf space to carry the community's lowest common denominator of product, which means it's well stocked with Mike's Hard Lemonade and Canadian Club whiskey. To satisfy the more, shall we say, discriminating palate, you have to drive for 45 minutes to the city of Belleville (population 48 000) which is served by exactly ONE LCBO store.

Compare this to the experience in most US cities. For example, the upstate New York city of Watertown (population 27 000) near the Canadian border has seven conveniently located liquor stores and every grocery store has a huge selection of beer and wine, including fantastic local microbrews and an impressive selection of imported and domestic wine. The first time I wandered into the Hannaford's grocery store there and beheld the beer & wine section I felt like Howard Carter opening the tomb of Tutankhamun - I saw "wonderful things".

Once every decade or so someone runs in a provincial election in Ontario promising to release the LCBO's death grip and allow the sale of wine and beer in convenience and grocery stores, but inevitably the powerful LCBO employees' union mounts a ferocious campaign which portrays it as the only thing standing between the citizens and the complete moral collapse of society. Without the LCBO standing guard, there will be thousands of drunken infants littering the gutters of Ontario and the whole province will turn into a hellhole like Watertown. Inevitably the party foolhardy enough to propose the end of the monopoly backs off.

Is it impossible to end a state monopoly on alcohol sales? In Ontario, that seems to be the case. However, voters in Washington State have recently shown that it can be done:

Thanks to a $22.7 million campaign headed up by Costco, grocery stores and other large retail establishments will soon be allowed to sell booze. What's particularly neat about the ballot measure was that it abolished not only the state's monopoly on retail, but on distribution as well. Liquor sellers will now be allowed to buy directly from distillers and warehouse their own inventory rather than going through the state.

The ballot intitiative was approved by 60% of the votes cast, in spite of the dire predictions of the No campaign:

Early on, the No campaign focused on the safety implications of the measure and was winning in phone surveys. Its lead diminished as the campaign turned to speculation about how many gas stations and minimarts might sell liquor, and to Costco.

In a statement, the opposition coalition said it remains concerned about the public-safety consequences and hopes the measure's supporters will make good on promises of extra revenue for law enforcement.

The fact that 900 state liquor store employees would lose their jobs didn't make much difference. In fact, the change is expected to generate more jobs and increase revenue to the State of Washington:

The state budgeting office figures the number of outlets selling liquor will jump from 328 to 1,428. It also expects the change to generate an average of $80 million more in annual revenue for the state and local governments over the next six years.

I would like to think that such a thing is possible in Ontario, but with the voters having recently chosen another four years of Nanny McGuinty, that has about as much chance as a wine cooler in hell.

Occupy Ottawa - at this rate, the revolution is going to take awhile

2011-10-24T21:23:00.012-04:00

I was in Ottawa on the weekend to attend a concert at the downtown National Arts Centre, so on Saturday afternoon while I was waiting to hobnob with the bourgeoisie I wandered down the block to Confederation Park where the "99%" are camped out to Occupy Ottawa. From what I saw, the revolution is going to be a tough sell.

Confederation Park is located within sight of the Parliament Buildings at the corner of Laurier and Elgin, about a block from the War Memorial and the National Arts Centre. It covers about a city block and fronts onto two of Ottawa's busiest streets. The protesters have set up a tent city on the lawn in one corner of the park.

Ottawa is of course the national capital and is the fourth largest urban area in Canada after Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Including the surrounding suburbs, it has a population approaching 1 150 000 people. You'd think that here at the nexus of the government/urban/military/industrial complex the Occupy Wall Street movement would find a seething cauldron of revolutionary fervor ripe for upheaval, but apparently the message isn't resonating with Ottawa residents; I counted less than a hundred people in the park at 1:00 pm on a beautiful fall day, and most of the ones I talked to were from out of town.

The tent city has maybe 50 tents set up around a forlorn and muddy common area that serves as sort of a main office. Here's a panoramic shot taken from Elgin St:

There's a little soup kitchen with a few people standing around chatting about revolution:

The residents mill about, hanging up wet bedding and making announcements using their weird call-and-response "human microphone". While I was there I heard someone yell "Mic check" and everyone responded "MIC CHECK". The first person yelled "Is there anyone here from the security committee?" and everyone standing around chanted "IS THERE ANYONE HERE FROM THE SECURITY COMMITTEE?" even though no one in the camp was further than 20 yards from the person asking the question.

Everyone seems bored and waiting for something to happen. People skateboard and throw frisbees around. There's a permanent smell of pot smoke in the air.

The usual angry signs are scattered around the park, but it seems a little forced. The messages are mixed to say the least - this sign outlines the broad spectrum of their grievances, which just about covers everything:

There were several confusing signs referring to the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act which was passed by the US Congress - not sure what that has to do with Ottawa or the Canadian banking system, but the movement is a big tent, apparently.

I must say, for a group that according to the breathless reporting of the media is about to march on the manor houses with torches and pitchforks, it's the most unthreatening crowd I've ever been in. I've felt more on edge during high school basketball games. They have meetings all the time and there are tons of committees and healthy snacks; they even recycle their garbage. It's like a meeting of an elementary school PTA.

People are friendly and love to talk; I chatted for a while with these two young men, one from Vancouver via Montreal, and the other from Toronto. The guy on the left smoked pot during the entire conversation while his two pet rats clambered over him; both of them were eager to explain why they were there.

The guy with the pipe said he had come up from Occupy Montreal because "there were too many rules" in the Montreal camp. Apparently Occupy Ottawa is a lot more libertarian. The guy in black told me he had come from Toronto where he "ran a transportation company" which also has a branch in Ottawa. I asked him who's running the company while he's camped out in Confederation Park: he responded that he "has employees" and that he runs the company from his smart phone, and he really should be home doing invoices. Sounds pretty bourgeois to me.

When I asked them how it was going in the camp, they both said things were generally fine, but they were having problems with homeless people. "They come in at night and eat our food, and a lot of them are drunk" said Pipe Guy. Transportation Guy nodded and said "I support the homeless, but a lot of them are taking advantage. Sometimes they create problems - like one of them assaulted a woman the other day." When I asked him what they do when this kind of thing happens in the camp, he said "we call the police".

Transportation Guy seemed a little frustrated by the lack of focus; "No one's in charge here", he complained. "Isn't that kind of the point?" I politely prodded. "Well, when there are no leaders, nothing gets done" he responded. There you have it - the only thing this anarchist movement needs is leaders.

I asked how long they were preparing to camp in the park; "as long as it takes" was the reply. When I asked if they had ever spent a winter in Ottawa, they said that they were preparing to insulate their tents, and that they would build igloos once the snow was deep enough. "When change comes and the system crashes, we want people to have a place where they can come when it happens." Transportation Guy said that he figured the police would kick them out by Winterlude, the winter carnival that happens in Ottawa in February, since they usually put the ice sculptures in the park. They were negotiating with the local Algonquin natives for permission to camp since "they basically own all the land around here anyway". If the police kick them out for Winterlude, they're planning to move to Parliament Hill.

Later that afternoon we were walking through the Byward Market. Capitalism seems alive and well there - the place was thronged with people buying stuff and enjoying the weather in the sidewalk cafes. Business seems to be good; a far cry from the sad atmosphere up at Confederation Park.

In the middle of our stroll, we crossed paths with Ottawa's Hallowe'en Zombie Walk. Hundreds of people dressed as zombies were lurching down Dalhousie Street moaning "brains". There was even an appearance by the late Colonel Gaddafi. The zombies outnumbered the protesters at least ten to one, proving that in the historic contest between anarchy and the market, the market usually wins.

Later that night on the way back from the concert, we heard music coming from Confederation Park. It was Open Mic Night at Occupy Ottawa, and a kid not much older than twenty was singing half-heartedly to a crowd of about fifty people, while bourgeois corporate types like me watched on in amusement. He was singing Bob Dylan's "The times they are a'changin' " and Neil Young's "After the gold rush" while clouds of pot smoke drifted through the park. That's the image I'll remember of Occupy Ottawa - kids too young to remember the actual sixties trying in vain to recreate them while members of the generation that lived through them look on bemusedly on their way to and from their jobs. This movement is based on hot air, nostalgia and ennui - they'll be out of the park by the time the snow falls.

Gay rights & hate crimes

2011-10-18T19:37:00.006-04:00

The case of William Whatcott has been heard by the Supreme Court, and the justices have reserved judgement on whether Mr. Whatcott committed a hate crime by distributing home-made pamphlets denouncing homosexual behaviour. They will release a written decision in the near future on whether to overturn the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal's acquittal of his conviction by the Saskatchewan Human Rights Tribunal for "hate speech".

The Supreme Court's decision will be scrutinized by both sides in the case; free speech advocates who believe that Mr. Whatcott's right to freely express his religious opinions have been violated, and gay rights groups who see his prosecution as necessary to protect homosexuals from harassment.

Mr. Whatcott's opinions are truly offensive, and I cringe when I read them:

Mr. Whatcott, 43, was judged by a tribunal to have violated Saskatchewan's hate-speech law by distributing pamphlets, beginning 10 years ago, claiming a homosexual conspiracy to corrupt young people in Saskatchewan schools.

"Our children will pay the price in disease, death, abuse and ultimately eternal judgment if we do not say no to the sodomite desire to socialize your children into accepting something that is clearly wrong," said one flyer. In another, he photocopied a classified ad: "I'm 28, 160#, searching for boys/men for penpals, friendship, exchanging video, pics, magazines & anything more. Your age, look & nationality is not so relevant." Above it, he wrote, quoting the Bible, "If you cause one of these little ones to stumble, it would be better that a millstone was tied around your neck and you were cast into the sea."

That being said, I think John Carpay of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms has it exactly right when he writes in an op-ed in the National Post that the right to be rude must be protected in a free democracy, and that no one has the right to not be offended:

After many years - and tens of thousands of dollars in legal costs - the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal ruled that Whatcott had not violated the human rights law prohibiting speech which "exposes or tends to expose to hatred, ridicules, belittles or otherwise affronts the dignity of any person or class of persons." The commission appealed to the Supreme Court, which will rule on Whatcott's guilt or innocence, as well as the constitutional validity of this restriction on free speech.

Banning hate speech to protect the vulnerable might be a good idea if anyone could explain the difference between hate and strong dislike. The commission and its allies argued that rude, offensive, unpopular, controversial and hurtful speech is OK, but "hateful" speech is not. According to the commission, Whatcott is fully entitled to express his opinion that homosexual behaviour is sinful and unhealthy, but he must deliver this message in a way that does not come across as "hateful" to any of his listeners. Even the Supreme Court's definition of "hate" in its 1990 decision in Taylor is subjective, depending largely (if not entirely) on the feelings and mindset of the listener, and on unverifiable guesses as to the feelings of the speaker.

Speech that should be banned - such as advocating genocide and counselling a criminal offence - is already prohibited by the Criminal Code. Further restrictions on speech in human rights legislation cast a chill on every citizen's freedom to express opinions on issues important to them. The fact that Maclean's magazine, Calgary Catholic Bishop Fred Henry, Western Standard publisher Ezra Levant and Red Deer pastor Stephen Boissoin were eventually found innocent of violating human rights speech codes is cold comfort to the average citizen. Criminal Code restrictions against certain forms of speech are pretty clear. But citizens have no certainty in knowing what may or may not trigger a human rights prosecution against them.

...

A legal right not to be offended is incompatible with a free and democratic society. The right to express oneself, to participate in democracy, and to seek truth through debate and argument, is a right possessed by all people, regardless of their level of education or their income. Not everyone uses the kind of language that one hears at a dinner party in Rosedale. The issues that matter most to us as citizens are often the issues that produce the most heated and polemical exchanges.

...

The state should criminalize speech that advocates or justifies the use of violence. Beyond that, the state should not be in the business of censoring speech, or choosing victim groups. The Whatcott case presents the Supreme Court with a unique opportunity to reject the vague and subjective language - and the chilling effect on free speech - of human rights laws.

I am offended by Mr. Whatcott's writing and by his implication that because I am gay I am a diseased pedophile and that in the good old days I would have had a millstone tied around my neck and been cast into the sea. But, in a free society we must tolerate all kinds of speech that don't actually incite violence or provoke criminal activity. The best response to offensive speech is to expose it in the public square for what it is. Otherwise, legitimate free speech is stifled and offensive ideas are driven underground, which is even worse. Regulating offensive speech implies that functionaries of the government will decide what type of speech is deemed out-of-bounds and thus prohibited - that to me is a much more offensive proposition.

Give Pizza A Chance

2011-10-17T17:23:00.005-04:00

When he was president of the Godfather's Pizza Company, Herman Cain poked fun at that loathsome John Lennon anthem so loved by lefties. Cain is currently leading the polls in the race for Republican nominee for the 2012 U.S. presidential election.

(HT: Ed Driscoll)

Ben & Jerry's Megacorp. Ltd. Supports "Occupy Wall Street"

2011-10-11T18:10:00.010-04:00

The Board of Directors of Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream Inc. has issued a statement of support for the protesters of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement:

We know the media will either ignore you or frame the issue as to who may be getting pepper sprayed rather than addressing the despair and hardships borne by so many, or accurately conveying what this movement is about. All this goes on while corporate profits continue to soar and millionaires whine about paying a bit more in taxes. And we have not even mentioned the environment.

This is priceless coming from a company that, as Ed Driscoll points out, is a division of the British/Dutch multinational corporation Unilever:

Unilever owns more than 400 brands as a result of acquisitions, however, the company focuses on what are called the "billion-dollar brands", 13 brands, each of which achieve annual sales in excess of €1 billion. Unilever's top 25 brands account for more than 70% of sales

I'm sure that goes over well with Naomi Klein and the No Logo crowd. By the way, what does it take to run a socially-conscious politically-correct Ben & Jerry's franchise these days? Here's a helpful guide:

What does it take to become a Ben & Jerry's franchisee?
Strong business acumen and knowledge of how to develop and operate a business.
Restaurant management, retail management, or business ownership experience in the last 10 years.
A full-time commitment to building and developing the Ben & Jerry's franchise business.
A minimum net worth of $300,000 (excluding residence), of which $80,000 must be liquid.
Answers to Frequently Asked Questions:
Average total start-up cost per shop is approximately $250,000.
Our franchisee fee is on a sliding scale from $30,000 to $9,000.
Royalties are 3% of gross sales; the marketing contribution is 4%.
We do not offer financing, but we do have relationships with national lenders who prefer to work with our franchisees. This approval process can be expedited to about 2-3 weeks.

Well, I'm glad the Board of Directors is putting its money where its mouth is, so to speak. Plus, it's apparently good for business - Unilever stock was trading today (on the New York Stock Exchange, oddly enough) at a share price of US$31.87, up $0.09.

Free advice for the Ontario Tories

2011-10-09T00:55:00.011-04:00

I spent the election campaign waiting expectantly for Tim Hudak to give me a good reason to vote for the Progressive Conservatives. After the most inept and underwhelming campaign in recent memory, I finally decided to hold my nose and vote for them anyway. It's a sad state of affairs when a life-long Tory supporter like myself ends up voting against the Liberals rather than for the Conservatives. This state of affairs in Ontario has to change or the Liberals will be in power for a generation. Herewith, after much reflection, are my suggestions for Tim Hudak.

Stake out your place on the political spectrum

Stop trying to compete with the Liberals for the mushy political middle. You're a conservative: start acting like one. The right side of the ideological divide is completely empty in Ontario and there are four big-government interventionist parties competing for voters in the centre-left. People are yearning for a clear political choice - if your platform is indistinguishable from that of your opponents, why would anyone vote for you? We need a party that relentlessly advocates small government, fiscal discipline, low taxes, free-market economics and personal responsibility. The Conservatives need to be the party of the right and abandon the left to the Liberals and the NDP.

Social conservatism is a dead end

Sorry to all the socons who may be reading this, but policies aimed at social conservatives alienate the centrists and libertarians that the party needs to win elections. Hudak tossed out some policies aimed at the socon wing of the party (chain gangs for prison inmates, public sex-offender registries, "foreign workers", sex education) and walked right into the same trap that snared John Tory when he proposed tax credits for religious schools. Policies like this make the PCs look mean and narrow-minded and are political poison to a lot of voters. Matters of morality are best left to individuals and families, and heavy-handed law and order policies, especially in a time of declining crime rates, make conservatives seem heartless. Give it up.

Stop running away from Mike Harris

Hudak spent a lot of time running away from his past as a member of Mike Harris' government and laughed nervously every time the issue was raised. Huh? Lots of conservatives still support many of Harris' policies and believe that Ontario's dire financial situation needs a dose of the same medicine. Going out of your way to distance yourself from a man who won two consecutive majority governments for the PCs alienates your supporters and confirms to independent voters that you're not that different from the Liberals. Stop apologizing for the Harris legacy - explain it, own it, and be proud of it.

The media are not your friends

The established media are hostile to conservatives and have a vested interest in electing a Liberal government - don't count on them to get your message out. Ignore the CBC, CTV, the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star and concentrate on grass-roots politicking. Trying to suck up to the main-stream media is pointless.

Go negative

I was begging for someone, anyone, in the PC party to attack McGuinty on his abysmal record of lies, failed policies, fraud and outright chicanery, and all we got was the "sneaky eco-tax" commercial with McGuinty intoning "some things will cost more". The word "Caledonia" was, to my knowledge, not mentioned once in the entire election. Dalton McGuinty is a dishonest charlatan - it's time the PCs get personal and go for the jugular. There's a lot of anger out there and people are frustrated. Tap into it!

Don't try to be hip

I can sum up the inept PC campaign in one word - "changebook". Seriously? That's the name of your policy document? I assume the brain trust that came up with that one was trying to tap into the zeitgeist and show that the PCs are down with the hip urban Facebook crowd. Look - Hudak has a Twitter feed! Look at all the "likes" he has on his Facebook page! Word to Tim Hudak - an election is not a high school cafeteria and no one except the CBC gives a damn if you've embraced social media, especially if you don't have any policies worth a tweet that are actually going to change anything. Fire your media consultants, figure out what the hell you stand for, and give people like me who are desperate for real change in Ontario something worth voting for.

The PC party did not deserve to win this election, and I hope that four years in opposition will focus the minds of the people who run the party. I'm not hopeful, though - it didn't happen after Ernie Eves or John Tory lost their respective elections, so why would it happen now?

Why bother voting for the Ontario Tories?

2011-09-24T12:23:00.008-04:00

I've been following the Ontario election for the past few weeks hoping that I'll hear something, anything, that will make me enthusiastic about voting for Tim Hudak. I've got to say, it's been a tough slog.

Hudak proposes to balance Ontario's budget (which, by the way, is projected to be $25 billion in the hole this fiscal year) largely by eliminating "waste". However, he plans to INCREASE funding for education and health care (which together account for over half of the province's expenses) by some $5 billion. At the same time, he plans to extend full-day kindergarten to all Ontario schools by 2014, fill classrooms with expensive technology, increase the number of spaces at post-secondary schools by 60 000, hire more doctors and expand hospitals and home care, all while reducing taxes by 5%. This will be paid for largely by eliminating "waste and fraud" and reducing the size of the civil service. I'm sorry, but the PC economic policies just don't make sense, and there are no serious proposals for the type of sweeping structural changes that are going to be necessary to pull Ontario back from the brink.

The Ontario PCs also have an unfortunate tendency to focus on red meat law-and-order issues that frighten away centrist voters and make conservatives seem like heartless monsters. This campaign has seen Hudak promise to put prison inmates in chain gangs and make the sex offender registry publicly available on-line so that communities can take the law into their own hands "to protect their own kids". Good grief - chain gangs and vigilantes? This is a serious political party?

I was all set to vote in protest for the Freedom Party, knowing that it would probably do nothing but split the conservative vote and help the Liberals win another four years with McGuinty at the helm. Then a breath of fresh air blew in this weekend when I sat down with my morning coffee and read this in the National Post: comments from McGuinty and Hudak made in interviews with the paper's editorial board last week. Maybe Hudak gets it after all.

McGuinty: I'm no longer a Boy Scout. I know what it means to put your public muscle behind a strategic initiative like clean energy. It's up to us to decide on an opportunity, and I recognize green energy as a tremendous opportunity... Yeah, I picked a spot. I'm driving for it, hard, in an unrelenting fashion.

Hudak: This is the difference between Dalton McGuinty and I. I don't pick winners and losers. I don't think that I know best where the economy is going and I'll double-down on building a wind turbine, solar panels and casting out jobs elsewhere. I won't give out $230-million contracts to a video-game manufacturer to get a photo-op and try to look modern. I believe we have mechanisms to determine the marketplace: They're called customers. We have tremendous strengths in our province in financial services, technologies, mining, forestry, I believe there is still a future in manufacturing as well. We're not bringing back the jobs that disappeared but I think there can be broadbased job creation. I reject the notion a premier or some big thinker will know where the next jobs are from and put all our eggs in the one basket of a green-energy or affirmative-action program.

Whoa! Did Tim Hudak really say that? Maybe there's hope. Maybe we don't have to put up with another four years of Nanny McGuinty micromanaging the economy while embarking on ridiculously expensive social-engineering projects. Maybe the gross incompetence of the last eight years - Caledonia, the health care "premium", e-Health, Eco-fees, the HST, etc ad nauseam, will be rewarded with a well-deserved thrashing, and Premier McGuinty can retire to write his memoirs and be rewarded with a nice ambassadorship somewhere.

Dirty Harry on gay marriage

2011-09-14T17:32:00.003-04:00

Actor/director Clint Eastwood, one of Hollywood's few Republicans, let loose in a recent interview with GQ magazine. On the subject of gay marriage:

These people who are making a big deal about gay marriage?" Eastwood tells the magazine. "I don't give a fuck about who wants to get married to anybody else! Why not?! We're making a big deal out of things we shouldn't be making a deal out of ... Just give everybody the chance to have the life they want.

Clint considers himself more of a libertarian than a true Republican:

I was an Eisenhower Republican when I started out at 21, because he promised to get us out of the Korean War," Eastwood tells the magazine. "And over the years, I realized there was a Republican philosophy that I liked. And then they lost it. And libertarians had more of it. Because what I really believe is, let's spend a little more time leaving everybody alone.

Dirty Harry for President in 2012?

(HT: Box Turtle Bulletin)

Miss Fonda regrets ...

2011-09-06T17:53:00.005-04:00

What was Hanoi Jane Fonda's biggest regret, according to the Daily Mail?

"I never got to f**k Che Guevara"

Ah yes, Che Guevara, the Butcher of La Cabana, who slaughtered hundreds of political opponents, imprisoned homosexuals and brutally enforced rigid cultural conformity. If she had been Cuban and had dared to exercise her right to criticize the regime as she so fondly did in America, she would have earned a lengthy prison sentence of hard labour if not the death penalty. Truly there's no whore like an old whore.

Bob Rae for NDP leader

2011-08-31T20:36:00.007-04:00

I have a modest proposal for the now-leaderless federal NDP: Why not consider Bob Rae for your new leader? This option has several attractive benefits:

It would finally cement Rae's reputation as a shameless political opportunist. He's a Dipper! No, wait - he's a Liberal! No, wait ...
It would confirm that Liberals have no coherent political ideology other than gaining and retaining power.
It would be a shining example of what would await the country if (shudder) the federal NDP ever forms a government. The campaign slogans practically write themselves: "Vote NDP & let Bob Rae do for the country what he did for Ontario!"
The sparring between Rae as Leader of the Opposition and Prime Minister Harper would make Question Period worth watching again. Imagine Darth Harper rising in the House in awful majesty, all dark clouds and thunderbolts, fixing his evil eye on the helpless rebels gathered around Rae on the opposition benches - the thought makes me giggle like a little girl.

Come on, Dippers - put aside partisan politics and do this for the country. We look to you in our hour of need.

RELATED: File this under "I wish I'd written that" - John Ivison of the National Post, writing in an editorial about Rae's leadership of the Liberal Party: "Satire will die the day Canadians flock to support Bob Rae on a ticket of prosperity and economic growth."

[Image stolen from Stephen Taylor]

Stupid is as stupid does

2011-08-09T11:39:00.003-04:00

Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal asks the question Is Obama Smart?. An excerpt:

Of course, it's tempting to be immodest when your admirers are so immodest about you. How many times have we heard it said that Mr. Obama is the smartest president ever? Even when he's criticized, his failures are usually chalked up to his supposed brilliance. Liberals say he's too cerebral for the Beltway rough-and-tumble; conservatives often seem to think his blunders, foreign and domestic, are all part of a cunning scheme to turn the U.S. into a combination of Finland, Cuba and Saudi Arabia.

I don't buy it. I just think the president isn't very bright.

Socrates taught that wisdom begins in the recognition of how little we know. Mr. Obama is perpetually intent on telling us how much he knows. Aristotle wrote that the type of intelligence most needed in politics is prudence, which in turn requires experience. Mr. Obama came to office with no experience. Plutarch warned that flattery "makes itself an obstacle and pestilence to great houses and great affairs." Today's White House, more so than any in memory, is stuffed with flatterers.

Much is made of the president's rhetorical gifts. This is the sort of thing that can be credited only by people who think that a command of English syntax is a mark of great intellectual distinction. Can anyone recall a memorable phrase from one of Mr. Obama's big speeches that didn't amount to cliché? As for the small speeches, such as the one we were kept waiting 50 minutes for yesterday, we get Triple-A bromides about America remaining a "Triple-A country." Which, when it comes to long-term sovereign debt, is precisely what we no longer are.

Fighting back against wi-fi squatters

2011-08-05T21:02:00.005-04:00

I was in a Starbucks in Belleville, Ontario a couple of days ago, sipping my latte and reading a paper copy of the National Post (I know - how delightfully old-fashioned) when a young woman in her mid-twenties walked up to my table and made a request. "Excuse me, sir," she said, "I have to use my laptop and you're sitting at a table near an electrical outlet. I wonder if you would move to another table?" I looked at her in slack-jawed amazement. The shop was packed, largely with young people hogging tables with their laptops and taking advantage of the store's free wi-fi while nursing a single coffee for hours and hours. I looked at her with one eyebrow raised to hopefully convey my annoyance and said "Are you going to find me another table?" She said "Well, there aren't any other tables." I responded "Well, I guess I'm not moving then." She sighed and shuffled off.

These wi-fi parasites are getting out of hand. Try getting a seat in the Starbucks in Indigo Books on Princess Street in Kingston - day in and day out the tables are full of Queen's students doing their homework just a few blocks away from a multi-million dollar state-of-the-art library on a campus where every building (including the residences where they actually live) has free wi-fi. And yet they camp out all day in a public coffee shop crowding out the paying customers while they incessantly update their Facebook profiles and tweet each other. I once had to eat a sandwich there while perched on a window ledge.

So, imagine my delight when I read that some Starbucks stores in New York are fighting back:

They’re called Starbucks “squatters.” You know, those folks with their laptops who take all the seats and never seem to leave.

But, as CBS 2′s Scott Rapoport, reports the coffee house giant has a plan brewing to fix that.

You know how some Starbucks customers and their computers like to make a permanent home in the coffee emporium, hogging up all the seats for hours, mooching off the free Wi-Fi and preventing you from sitting down and enjoying the latte you paid $5 for?

Well, now some Starbucks in New York City are reportedly pulling the plug on that idea, actually covering up their electrical outlets to discourage squatters.

“Customers are asking (for it). They just purchased a latte and a pastry and there is nowhere to sit down in some of these high-volume stores,” Starbucks spokesperson Alan Hilowitz said.

“People actually live here. You know what I’m saying?” added Alan Glowko of Astoria.

It is a move that has some Starbucks regulars saying … it’s about time.

“If there’s no more space to sit, they should get up and leave,” said Katie Krug of Burlington, Vt.

“I mean, you can’t use their electricity for like eight hours. I mean honestly,” Glowko added.

Memo to Tim Horton's management: the day you install free wi-fi in your coffee shops is the day when civilization will finally collapse.

Right wing Christian fundamentalist arrested planning another bomb attack ...

2011-07-28T15:42:00.007-04:00

Oops - not so fast. MSNBC is reporting that an AWOL U.S. soldier has been arrested while planning a bomb attack on Fort Hood, Texas:

Killeen, Texas, police arrested Pfc. Naser J. Abdo, 21, of Garland, Texas, on Wednesday at a motel near Fort Hood, police said. The Austin American-Statesman reported that Abdo, an infantryman with the 1st Brigade Combat Team (Rear Provisional) of the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Ky., was arrested at an America's Best Value Inn on South Fort Hood Road.

U.S. officials told NBC News that police went to Abdo's motel room on a tip from a gun dealer who said Abdo was asking suspicious questions about smokeless powder, a component often used in pipe bombs. Explosives were found in the room and in a backpack, the officials said.

A U.S. military official said Abdo was overheard saying he wanted to attack Fort Hood and that he repeated the statement after he was in custody. Authorities said it was not clear whether his alleged intended targets were soldiers in general or specific individuals on the base.

What could his motivation be? Probably reading Mark Steyn and Bruce Bawer:

Abdo was arrested on a child pornography warrant, police said. He had been wanted since he went AWOL earlier this month after he was recommended for a court-martial in a child pornography investigation at Fort Campbell.

...

Abdo sought conscientious objector status last year, arguing that his Muslim beliefs prohibited military service. The Army approved his application in May, then, two days later, it charged him with possession of child pornography, which put his discharge on hold, he said on a Facebook page.

...

Abdo's campaign to leave the Army got considerable coverage beginning in August, when he gave several televised interviews.

"As my time came near to deployment, I started asking the question more seriously whether God would accept what I was doing and whether I was really meant to go to war, as opposed to the peace that Islam preaches," he said in an August interview with Headline News. He made similar comments in interviews with al-Jazeera.
As recently as June, Abdo was pursuing his battle on the Facebook page, where he describes himself as "engaged in a struggle against religious discrimination and for freedom of conscience in the US Army."

Right - got it. Struggling against religious discrimination, Islam preaches peace, blah blah blah.

The tolerant Middle East

2011-07-28T12:13:00.002-04:00

Guess which Middle Eastern cities hold massive Gay Pride parades every year? That would be Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

Tel Aviv's parade was held on June 3:

Tens of thousands of people attended Tel Aviv’s annual Gay Pride Parade Friday afternoon, carrying colorful banners calling for equality.

“Being gay is ‘shaveh’ [worthwhile/ equal],” read the poster above the stage at Meir Park, where the parade began.

The event kicked off with a celebratory party in the park, complete with dancers, singers and drag queens.

Police closed streets along the parade route and near the beach, as the procession and street party got under way.

Organizers said that up to 100,000 people took part in the parade, but police put the number at some 70,000.

Police reported no unusual incidents of violence, and the parade concluded peacefully.

Jerusalem's event takes place today. Though not without controversy, specifically protests from the Orthodox Jewish community, it is expected to draw 5 000 people:

More than 5,000 marchers are expected to participate in Jerusalem’s 10th annual Gay Pride Parade on Thursday afternoon.

Open House Executive Director, Yonatan Gher, called Thursday a “combined social struggle,” which will have at least three distinct protests imbuing the city with the air of social fervor. Indeed, protesters will include the doctors marching towards Jerusalem, students and families camped out in tents across the city, and thousands of gay-rights activists marching downtown.

He estimated that the gay pride parade could almost double – from 4,000 participants last year to 7,000 participants this year – given the revolutionary vibe of the capital.

Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, the gay activists who marched in Toronto's Pride Parade last year, take note: the country you are so vehemently trying to delegitimize is the only country in the Middle East where homosexuals can live openly and free from state harrassment. Your embarrassing protest would be better directed at Iran:

On Sunday, November 13 [2005], the semi-official Tehran daily Kayhan reported that the Iranian government publicly hung two men, Mokhtar N. (24 years old) and Ali A. (25 years old), in the Shahid Bahonar Square of the northern town of Gorgan.

The government reportedly executed the two men for the crime of "lavat." Iran’s shari`a-based penal code defines lavat as penetrative and non-penetrative sexual acts between men. Iranian law punishes all penetrative sexual acts between adult men with the death penalty. Non-penetrative sexual acts between men are punished with lashes until the fourth offense, when they are punished with death. Sexual acts between women, which are defined differently, are punished with lashes until the fourth offense, when they are also punished with death.

“The execution of two men for consensual sexual activity is an outrage,” said Jessica Stern, researcher with the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights Program at Human Rights Watch. “The Iranian government’s persecution of gay men flouts international human rights standards.”

In addition to the two executions last week, there have been other cases of persecution and execution of gay men in Iran in recent years.

• In September 2003, police arrested a group of men at a private gathering in one of their homes in Shiraz and held them in detention for several days. According to Amir, one of the men arrested, police tortured the men to obtain confessions. The judiciary charged five of the defendants with “participation in a corrupt gathering” and fined them.
• In June 2004, undercover police agents in Shiraz arranged meetings with men through Internet chatrooms and then arrested them. Police held Amir, a 21-year-old, in detention for a week, during which time they repeatedly tortured him. The judicial authorities in Shiraz sentenced him to 175 lashes, 100 of which were administered immediately. Following his arrest, security officials subjected Amir to regular surveillance and periodic arrests. From July 2005 until he fled the country later in the year, police threatened Amir with imminent execution.

• On March 15, 2005, the daily newspaper Etemaad reported that the Tehran Criminal Court sentenced two men to death following the discovery of a video showing them engaged in homosexual acts. According to the paper, one of the men confessed that he had shot the video as a precaution in case his partner withdrew the financial support he had been providing in return for sex. In response to the man’s confession, his partner was summoned to the authorities and both men were sentenced to death. As the death penalty was pronounced against both men, it appears to have been based on their sexual activity.

“These abuses have created an atmosphere of terror for lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people throughout Iran,” said Stern. “But arrest, torture and execution are not limited to gays and lesbians. Any group of people deemed ‘immoral’ becomes subject to state-sanctioned persecution and even murder.”

Queers Against Iranian Terror anyone?

[crickets chirping]

Bias? What bias?

2011-07-27T08:17:00.003-04:00

The New York Times has published an article by John Tierney about liberal bias in academia which attempts to answer the question "why are conservatives such a minority at so many graduate schools?" Here's an excerpt:

“The most effective way to keep out a whole class of people who are unwelcome isn’t to bar entry, but to make sure that very few in that class will want to enter,” Dr. Wood wrote. “If it comes down to it, entry can still be impeded through other techniques, the feminist and the multiculturalist vetoes on the faculty search committee being the deadliest as far as conservatives go, although there are others.”

Republican scholars are more likely than Democrats to end up working outside academia, as documented by Daniel Klein, an economist at George Mason University. Dr. Klein, who calls himself a classical liberal (a k a libertarian), says that the university promotes groupthink because its system of “departmental majoritarianism” empowers the dominant faction to keep hiring like-minded colleagues. And when a faculty committee is looking to hire or award tenure, political ideology seems to make a difference, according to a “collegiality survey” conducted by George Yancey.

Dr. Yancey, a professor of sociology at the University of North Texas, asked more than 400 sociologists which nonacademic factors might influence their willingness to vote for hiring a new colleague. You might expect professors to at least claim to be immune to bias in academic hiring decisions.

But as Dr. Yancey reports in his new book, “Compromising Scholarship: Religious and Political Bias in American Higher Education,” more than a quarter of the sociologists said they would be swayed favorably toward a Democrat or an A.C.L.U. member and unfavorably toward a Republican. About 40 percent said they would be less inclined to vote for hiring someone who belonged to the National Rifle Association or who was an evangelical. Similar results were obtained in a subsequent survey of professors in other social sciences and the humanities.

Dr. Yancey, who describes himself as a political independent with traditional Christian beliefs and progressive social values, advises nonliberal graduate students to be discreet during job interviews. “The information in this research,” he wrote, “indicates that revealing one’s political and religious conservatism will, on average, negatively influence about half of the search committee one is attempting to impress.”

Most academics claim to be politically unbiased, but it's a moot point when the academic environment at graduate schools is subtly hostile to conservatives and the pool of graduate students self-selects for liberals.

"A double tragedy for Norway"

2011-07-24T10:32:00.008-04:00

Bruce Bawer writes at Pajamas Media that the attack in Norway will have an unwelcome side effect - that of silencing legitimate criticism of immigration policy and Islamic extremism in the country:

During those hours when we all thought this was a jihadist attack, one thought that crossed my mind was that this would change the political map of Norway. For years, the Progress Party, which is the second largest of Norway’s seven or eight major parties, has led the way in calling for more responsible policies on the immigration and integration of people from Muslim countries — and has been demonized as a bunch of right-wing extremist xenophobes who hate Muslims. I assumed that after this attack, Norwegians would vote in a Progress Party-led government in the next elections. Now it appears that the man who committed all these murders is a former member of the Progress Party and is, indeed, a right-wing extremist xenophobe who harbors (according to Dagbladet) a “violent hatred for Muslims” and multiculturalism, and who targeted the Labor Party youth camp because he blames the ruling Labor Party for the Islamization of Norway. Norway’s political future looks very different now, in short, than it did 24 hours ago.

...

It is deeply depressing to see this evil, twisted creature become the face of Islam criticism in Norway. Norwegian television journalists who in the first hours of the crisis were palpably uncomfortable about the prospect of having to talk about Islamic terrorism are now eagerly discussing the dangers of “Islamophobia” and “conservative ideology” and are drawing connections between the madness and fanaticism of Breivik and the platform of the Progress Party. Yesterday’s events, then, represent a double tragedy for Norway. Not only has it lost almost one hundred people, including dozens of young people, in a senseless rampage of violence. But legitimate criticism of Islam, which remains a very real threat to freedom in Norway and the West, has been profoundly discredited by association with this murderous lunatic.

This was evident in an article in the New York Times today by Nicholas Kulish titled Norway attacks shine light on right-wing extremism in Europe. Extremism of any type is dangerous, of course, but the events in Norway are being linked to political issues of great importance in an attempt to stifle perfectly legitimate criticism from conservatives. Kulish writes:

The attacks in Oslo on Friday have riveted new attention on right-wing extremists not just in Norway but across Europe, where opposition to Muslim immigrants, globalization, the power of the European Union and the drive toward multiculturalism has proven a potent political force and, in a few cases, a spur to violence.

The success of populist parties appealing to a sense of lost national identity has brought criticism of minorities, immigrants and in particular Muslims out of the beer halls and Internet chat rooms and into mainstream politics. While the parties themselves generally do not condone violence, some experts say a climate of hatred in the political discourse has encouraged violent individuals.

Mike McNally points out in a post titled Can the Left Resist the Temptation to Exploit the Norway Attacks? that the events in Norway will inevitably be used to de-legitimize conservatives and stifle legitimate political discourse:

The rush to get Breivik’s profile out there suggests an eagerness to exonerate Muslims by the authorities, and the regularity with which the “right-wing” connection is being repeated by the media suggests both relief and relish: not only do we not have to report bad things about Muslims, we get open season on right-wingers.

Right-wing fundamentalist Christian. It’s a slam-dunk for the liberal-left; the ultimate caricature of conservative extremism; the bogeyman that had until now existed largely in their imaginations made real.

...

As we learn more about Breivik (some scraps of biography are emerging), people on both the left and right will scrutinize his ideology as they did Jared Loughner’s after the Tucson, Arizona shootings. But there’s very little to scrutinize. Breivik and others who think like him are racists, pure and simple, and racism isn’t an ideology; it’s an irrational attitude that manifests itself as anything from unease to hatred, and one that isn’t exclusive to the left or the right.

Ghana about to arrest homosexuals?

2011-07-20T14:29:00.004-04:00

According to this report, the government of the Western Region of the African nation of Ghana is about to arrest all homosexuals in the area:

The Western Region Minister Paul Evans Aidoo has ordered the immediate arrest of all homosexuals in the region.

He has tasked the Bureau of National Investigations and all security agencies to smoke out persons suspected to be engaging in same sex.

He also enlisted the services of landlords and tenants to provide reliable information which will lead to the arrest of homosexuals.

His directive follows months of campaigns against the practice of homosexuality in the country.

Only yesterday, the Christian Council of Ghana capped months of protestations against the practice of homosexuality with a strongly worded message against the practice and courting Ghanaians not to vote for any politician who believes in the rights of homosexuals.

Homosexuality is illegal in Ghana, and the country's Bureau of National Investigations (BNI)is poised to begin rounding up homosexuals to deal with the "social canker":

The Bureau of National Investigations (BNI) has begun investigations into the growing rate of homosexuality in the Western and Central regions, Western Regional Minister, Mr. Paul Evans Aidoo has revealed.

According to the minister, there is the need for a thorough investigation into what he terms a "social canker" which has contributed to the growing rate of HIV/AIDS in the country.

...

Mr Paul Evans Aidoo revealed on Adom FM on Wednesday that, even though homosexuality is illegal, it is still widely practiced secretly which makes it very difficult to arrest the culprits.

He said it is very important for the homosexuals to be identified, especially those infected with STDs to control the spread.

The Western Regional Minister added that the BNI is working closely with the police, Ghana Health Service and the NGO to find a lasting solution to the problem.

Mr. Aidoo stressed the need for more education on the dangers of homosexuality in the country.

I have a suggestion for the gay activists at Queers Against Israeli Apartheid: here's a situation where a government is actually persecuting and arresting homosexuals and encouraging neighbours to "smoke them out". Dust off your protest signs and get to work. The Ghana High Commission in Ottawa is located at 1 Clemow Avenue - I eagerly await your response.

Pro-gay rights socialists vs pro-gay death Islamists

2011-07-07T10:09:00.005-04:00

Australian Ted Lapkin comments on a recent protest outside a Jewish-owned business in Melbourne:

This unruly mob was so stereotypical that could have been supplied direct from central casting. There were 'kafiyeh' Arab-scarf-wearing Leftwing atheists rallying in defence of the theocratic medievalists of Hamas. There were radical feminists protesting on behalf of an Islamic radical regime that would slap them into a burka so fast it would make their head swim. And let's not forget the Rip Van Winkle hippies, that de rigueur cohort of aging radicals who've never outgrown their anti-Vietnam war protest stage.

And all the while, these protestors were chanting the puerile, poetically-challenged slogans we've come to expect at such events: "hey hey, ho ho [FILL IN THE BLANK] has got to go."

But the most notable ditty of the evening told of liberating Palestine "from the river to the sea". For anyone not immersed in the intricacies of Middle Eastern geography, those boundaries include the entire territory of pre-1967 Israel proper.

...

I've already written about the bizarre strange-bedfellows alliance that's developed between pro-gay rights socialists and pro-gay death Islamists.

Hamas foreign minister Mahmoud a-Zahar has described gays as "a minority of perverts and the mentally and morally sick". And then there's the other perennial favourite cause of the modern feral Left - that surrogate of Teheran known as Lebanese Hezbollah.

Perhaps president Ahmadinejad knew what he was about after all when he declared that homosexuality is unknown in his country. Gay relationships between consenting adults are a capital crime in Iran and many young men have paid the ultimate price for being true to their own sexuality.

But the Trotskyists aren't about to let a little thing like the hanging deaths of Iranian homosexuals get between them and what really matters. There's a much larger principle at stake here. In the eyes of the hard-Left, the task of destroying the Jewish nation-state trumps all other considerations.

This is the same cognitive dissonance that infects Canadian anti-Zionists like Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, who produce an annual flurry of publicity by trying to march in Toronto's Gay Pride Parade. It takes willful ignorance of the facts for gay activists to publicly advocate the dismantling of the only country in the Middle East where gays can live in peace.

Hideous Public Art: the Ottawa Stainless Steel Edition

2011-07-05T19:10:00.016-04:00

It's been a long time since I've written about hideous public art, let alone mined the rich vein of hideousness to be found in the nation's capital, but a weekend in Ottawa has inspired me to take up the keyboard once again. Ottawa is often a city of great beauty, but these two sculptural monstrosities executed in industrial stainless steel effortlessly blight the landscape around them in a uniquely Canadian way.

The first work is located in front of Minto Place, a modern office development at the southwest corner of Slater and Kent Streets. Titled Northshore, it is the work of Canadian artist Noel Harding.

Admittedly the site, a bleak concrete pedestrian plaza in front of the tower, is an unlovely place, but this sculpture makes it even uglier. When I first glimpsed it I thought "Who put the giant teapot on the sidewalk?" On closer examination, it became clear that it was some kind of post-modern statement, since there was a slowly revolving Christmas tree stuck in the top and some dead vegetation poking out the spout.

Sadly, there was no helpful plaque on the plinth to explain the symbolism to perplexed passers-by, so I was left to my own devices. I figured that this being Ottawa, it had to have some political message; perhaps the dented teapot shape was meant to symbolize our throw-away consumer culture and the Christmas tree was a comment on the shallowness of our secular lives.

Fortunately the truth is only a Google search away:

landLAB and artist Noel Harding were selected as the winning team for a public art commission at 180 Kent Street in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada for the private developer Minto. The work, as titled, points outside itself – being a city mind dreaming of the woods. The silhouettes of plantings imagine, identify, and celebrate a symbolic character of the Canadian Wilderness that resonates in a quintessential relation as if holding the reality of Tom Thompson’s “The Jack Pine.” Plant material becomes more than simply landscape as they pay homage to nature itself; celebrated within a grand vessel. Reflective steel becomes the giant trunk of a fallen tree with an extruded branch, renewal in the reality of living trees and grasses protruding – turning (1RPM) in the physical illustration of time. NORTHSHORE is a confirming statement. The meanings are rich in evolution and layering yet succinct and pointed in symbol.

Oh, well I see it now that you mention it. However, the "living trees and grasses protruding" from the spout have dried up and died in the blast-furnace heat of the concrete plaza, and I fear the revolving Christmas tree isn't far behind. The theme of renewal and "dreaming of the woods" is a tough sell here, but that must be all part of that rich layering thing.

There is one pleasing aspect of the sculpture - it's shiny convoluted surface distorts images like a funhouse mirror, so at least there's some minor entertainment value to walking past it on the sidewalk.

While I was in Ottawa I took in the exhibit of paintings by the 16th Century Italian artist Caravaggio and his contemporaries which is on this summer at the National Gallery of Canada. After spending a few hours immersed in the lush paintings of the Roman Renaissance, we took advantage of the beautiful weather and took a walk around the grounds of the gallery. On the Nepean Point side we were confronted by this monumental piece of stainless steel jutting a hundred feet into the air:

This work, by American artist Roxy Paine, is titled One Hundred Foot Line, and it juts out of the park at Nepean Point like a piece of wreckage left behind by an F5 tornado. It is truly gigantic, and it sticks out like an Axis of Ugliness smack dab in the middle of one of the most scenic spots in the city. Here's a shot with Parliament Hill in the background:

Here's another from Parliament Hill itself, looking across the Rideau Canal with the Ottawa River in the background:

To truly appreciate its visual assault, you have to stand close to it. The bright sunlight glares off its polished surface and makes it impossible to ignore:

What to make of this work? It looks like a jagged lightning strike or a gargantuan inverted icicle. Its installation in this location seems to me a deliberate thumbing of the nose at the philistines who built the Parliamentary precinct in their beloved Gothic Revival style and the nearby Chateau Laurier Hotel like an oh-so-quaint Loire Valley castle. The unwashed masses would recoil at the idea of razing these cutesy relics of colonial oppression, so why not put a brutal 100 ft high piece of jagged stainless steel right beside the statue of Champlain on Nepean Point so it's visible to all the tourists visiting these corny buildings?

The National Gallery helpfully explains this sculpture to the perplexed:

A monumental new sculpture now graces one of Ottawa’s most picturesque skylines, thanks to a new acquisition by the National Gallery of Canada. At 30.5 metres high, One Hundred Foot Line by critically-acclaimed contemporary artist Roxy Paine is his most ambitious sculpture to date in terms of upward scale. Overlooking the Ottawa River from Nepean Point, One Hundred Foot Line beautifully references Canada’s capital and its proximity to nature as well of industry in this region.

One Hundred Foot Line is from a series of tree sculptures called Dendroids that has earned American artist Roxy Paine significant international acclaim in recent years. Made from unyielding, stainless steel pipes used in manufacturing and heavy industry, One Hundred Foot Line is a masterful example of Paine’s intense fascination with trees and his technical ability to create sublime structures from industrial materials. For him, the Dendroids represent an attempt to observe trees as a language governed by rules and structures and reflect his thoughts on human encroachment on the environment.

The sculpture presents a meandering tree trunk that has lost not only its leaves but all of its branches. The tallest of Paine’s Dendroids to date, the work welds together dozens of stainless steel cylinders into a seamless whole. The National Gallery’s sculpture distinguishes itself from others in this series through its uniform shimmer which displays a calmly discerning monumentality. As a glossy line extending steadfastly upward, Paine’s latest offering is a bold statement on the relationship between nature and the “man made” in our contemporary world.

Oh bullshit. It "beautifully references Canada’s capital and its proximity to nature"? It "displays a calmly discerning monumentality"? How about this - it's an act of artistic vandalism that was installed to deliberately mar the landscape of one of the most beautiful spots in Canada. One only hopes it gets struck by lightning fairly soon. That would indeed be a "bold statement on the relationship between nature and the man made in our contemporary world"

"The decline of marriage isn't the fault of gays"

2011-06-28T18:07:00.005-04:00

James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal wonders why opponents of the recent legalization of gay marriage in New York aren't also up in arms about a law passed last August instituting "no-fault divorce" in the state. After all, isn't it all about defending traditional marriage?

Last August, to far less public attention, lawmakers in Albany enacted legislation making New York the final state to institute no-fault divorce, thereby abolishing even the pretense that marriage is a lifetime commitment under the law. Under this regime, marriage is a lifetime commitment only until one spouse decides otherwise.

As a Bloomberg report noted at the time, the Legislature took this step for a good practical reason, "to reduce long, cutthroat court battles over who's to blame when marriages fail":
"There is a human cost and a financial cost" to a system demanding fault-finding, Robert Ross, supervising judge of the matrimonial division in Nassau County, New York, on Long Island, said before the bill became law. "It's hard to know what impact a new law will have, but we do know that a grounds trial, and the expense and delay associated with it, is not a good thing."
New York's previous fault-based divorce system was out of step not only with the laws of the other 49 states but also with a culture in which divorce is commonplace and marriage for life is no longer the norm. This state of affairs has multiple and mutually reinforcing causes: female careerism, which reduces the value of the traditional male provider; the social acceptability of nonmarital sex (still quaintly termed "premarital"), made possible by the easy availability of contraception and abortion; and welfare and child-support laws that create incentives for childbearing outside marriage.

None of these developments have anything to do with homosexuality. Deroy Murdock made a good point some years back when he observed, in a column posted at NRO, that "social conservatives who blow their stacks over homosexual matrimony's supposed threat to traditional marriage tomorrow should focus on the far greater damage that heterosexuals are wreaking on that venerable institution today."

Edward Morrissey at The Week makes a similar point:

Part of the decline of families that began in the 1960s can be blamed on cultural changes and rebellion against older social paradigms, and some on government interventions, such as welfare regulations that undermined marriage specifically. It also resulted from liberalized divorce laws, especially so-called no-fault divorce. While divorce was never illegal, until the latter half of the twentieth century, government treated marriage as an actual contract whose abrogation carried substantial civil liabilities. To obtain a divorce, a spouse needed actual grounds for termination of the marital contract, and courts, at least theoretically, issued property and custody settlements on the basis of fault. At the least, this approach made divorce costly and potentially ruinous, which may have left unhappy marriages in effect, but also solidified the stability that social conservatives seek.

After no-fault divorce and its equivalents prevailed, there were no substantial penalties for abrogating the marital contract. The original intent of no-fault divorce was to make the process easier and get courts less involved, and on those counts, it succeeded beyond anyone’s imagination. One spouse can end a marriage and end up with half the property and custody merely by walking out on the other. It’s the only kind of legal partnership in which one party can opt out with little consequence just because he might find another potential partner a little more attractive, or has unilaterally tired of the other partner.

American marriage didn’t get devalued because New York’s legislature followed that of New Hampshire and Vermont in legalizing same-gender marriage. It got devalued when we began treating marriages as less important and less binding than business partnerships.

Morrissey's solution is to get the state out of marriage altogether:

Instead of demanding that states define and enforce marriage in a narrow sense, conservatives should demand that government stay out of defining and performing marriages at all. Couples that want to form partnerships should create a legal relationship based on existing contract law that is neutral to issues of gender and sexual preference. When one partner wants to end a partnership, then the terms of the contract should be enforced by courts. That will not only get rid of government as a spiritual arbiter in marriage, a role for which it has repeatedly proven unsuitable, it would encourage couples wishing to marry to discuss and agree in great detail the terms of their relationship up front. That kind of preparation — and the knowledge that a court will enforce a partnership agreement — will produce better and longer-lasting partnerships, in part by discouraging impulsive decisions to leap into marriage in the first place.

Essentially, we would replace government-defined marriage with civil unions, or domestic partnerships. What would happen to marriage? Those who want to enter into a marriage relationship would have to go to the places better equipped to deal with sanctification: churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples. Will that mean that some churches have different definitions of marriage? Possibly. Some churches may decide to marry same-gender couples, others may not.

However, when government gets out of the marriage business, it won’t be anyone else’s business, and it will end government definitions that end up being seen as endorsements of certain lifestyles or denunciations of others. At the least, it would save the people who fought to get government to define marriage from the regret of watching how it gets defined as tradition wanes.

I think it is hypocritical for people who oppose gay marriage on the grounds that it amounts to a "war on the family" to remain silent about no-fault divorce and extending the legal rights of marriage to common-law partners, both of which have had far more impact on families than gay marriage ever will. Morrissey's suggestion makes sense to me: let churches define what the religious sacrament of marriage means, but extend the secular legal and contractual benefits of partnership to gays and straights alike.

New ice age imminent?

2011-06-26T17:02:00.005-04:00

I guess we're going to have to start burning fossil fuels like mad & pumping as much CO₂ into the atmosphere as we can while we have the chance. This item from the website Peak Oil suggests that the Sun is entering a prolonged period of quiescence like that last seen in the 17th century during the so-called "Little Ice Age". Al Gore is going to explode when he reads this:

The sun is most likely going into hibernation as the latest unusual solar readings, including fading sunspots and weakening magnetic activity near the poles suggest that we are headed towards a solar event that hasn’t happened in hundreds of years, according to new data released Tuesday at the annual meeting of the solar physics division of the American Astronomical Society in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

Even though the Sun has been active recently as it heads towards solar maximum in 2013, there are three lines of evidence including a missing jet stream in the solar interior, fading sunspots on the sun’s visible surface, and changes in the corona and near the poles suggest that the next 11-year-long solar cycle will be far quieter than the current one or it may not even happen.

There are some scientists at the conference who said the current findings from the studies mean that we are at the beginning of a Maunder Minimum, a 70-year period that began around 1645 when hardly any sunspots were observed.

This decline in sunspots coincided with below-normal temperatures, in a climate period known as the Little Ice Age that struck Europe and North America, where temperatures dropped by 1.8 to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1-1.5 degrees Celsius).

However, don't get excited all you climate change deniers:

But scientists warn that the temperature change due to a decline in sunspot activity would likely be minimal and not enough to compensate for global warming.

Sure, pal. Whatever you say. I don't believe any of you anymore.

Mayor Ford: I won't be at the Pride parade either

2011-06-24T16:30:00.006-04:00

Since I'm one of a tiny group of gay conservative bloggers, my eight regular readers sometimes expect me to weigh in from the right side of the rainbow on gay issues in the news. This week's outrage is the revelation that Toronto Mayor Rob Ford will not be attending the city's Gay Pride parade on the Canada Day long weekend. Good for you, Mayor Ford - I won't be there either.

The Pride Parade is not my cup of tea. I think its over-the-top displays of hedonism and sexuality perpetuate some of the worst stereotypes about gay people. It sends a message to straight people that we're shallow, image-obsessed, licentious and horny all the time. When I finally came out to my mother a few years ago, after a good cry she said to me "Well, as long as you're happy I'm OK with it, but I have to tell you that I have a problem with Gay Pride parades". I assured her that she would never turn on the six o'clock news and see me marching down Church Street in assless leather chaps.

However, the parade is important to a lot of gay people who have in many cases suffered real pain and alienation as a result of their sexual orientation. Attending a Pride parade is an important rite of passage for many newly-out gays and lesbians who find for the first time an opportunity to be open and honest in a supportive environment.

My problem with the Pride parade is the political baggage that now clings to it like barnacles on a whale. Should it be publicly funded? Should Queers Against Israeli Apartheid be allowed to march in it or not? What politicians are marching and which ones are conspicuous by their absence?

In the old Soviet Union there was a huge May Day parade every year in Moscow and members of the Politburo appeared on the top of Lenin's Tomb to watch it. Pundits pored over the pictures to see who was there and who was standing where to glean some kind of insight into the secretive inner workings of the Kremlin. The Pride parade now serves the same purpose; elected politicians now feel obliged to attend to publicly prove their tolerance and open-mindedness. It has become a Canadian political litmus test into which people read all kinds of ulterior motives whether they are intended or not.

The so-called Gay Community is not monolithic; the only thing we all have in common is our sexual orientation. Our Venn Diagrams overlap in only this one area of our lives. We are urban and rural, old and young, professional and blue-collar, single and married, parents or childless, and - believe it or not - left wing and right wing. Marching in a parade should not be a yardstick by which politicians are judged when they have such divergent policies on the real issues that affect gay lives; mundane things like taxes, snow removal, garbage collection and policing.

Chris Selley wrote in today's National Post:

Is Mr. Ford homophobic? A few moronic outbursts notwithstanding, I see no reason to think so. His reputation as a sort of minorleague all-purpose bigot is baffling when compared with his record as a municipal politician: He obsessively solves people's problems, no matter who they are. This is a man who wouldn't hang up on a dude trying to score OxyContin. So the idea that riding a float at Pride would change anyone's mind about Mr. Ford is laughable in the first place. Many of the people professing "disappointment" at his decision this week were clearly overjoyed to have an opportunity to hate him even more.

So Mayor Ford would rather spend the weekend at the cottage than attend the Gay Pride Parade. So what? I agree with Chris that there is no evidence that this makes him homophobic or that he cares less about this segment of his constituency than any other. Did he march in the St Patrick's Day Parade, and did the Irish community wail and gnash their teeth about it? Is his attendance at Caribana now mandatory to demonstrate his support for Caribbean immigrants? He should be judged by his actions at City Hall, not by superficial photo ops at festivals.

For the record, I too am relaxing on "Pride Weekend" with my partner over beer and barbecue, miles away from the parade. I'll raise a toast to Mayor Ford while I'm at it.

James Delingpole on the IPCC

2011-06-19T09:51:00.004-04:00

James Delingpole vents at the Telegraph, prompted by the recently-revealed collusion between Greenpeace and the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change:

The Man Made Global Warming industry is a crock, a scam on an epic scale, fed by the world’s biggest outbreak of mass hysteria, stoked by politicians dying for an excuse to impose more tax and regulation on us while being seen to “care” about an issue of pressing urgency, fuelled by the shrill lies and tear-jerking propaganda of activists possessed of no understanding of the real world other than a chippy instinctive hatred of capitalism, given a veneer of scientific respectability by post-normal scientists who believe their job is to behave like politicians rather than dispassionate seekers-after-truth, cheered on by rent-seeking businesses, financed by the EU, the UN and the charitable foundations of the guilt-ridden rich, and promoted at every turn by schoolteachers, college lecturers, organic muesli packets, Walkers crisps, the BBC, CNBC, Al Gore, the Prince Of Wales, David Suzuki, the British Antarctic Survey, Barack Obama, David Cameron and Knut – the late, dyslexic-challenging, baby polar bear, formerly of Berlin Zoo.

And you really don’t need to be a contrarian or an out-there conspiracy theorist or a hard-core libertarian or a rampant free-market capitalist or a dyed in the wool conservative to think this way any more. This is reality. This is how it is. This is where all the overwhelming evidence points. So what kind of a bizarro, warped, intellectually challenged, cognitively dissonant, eco-fascistic nutcase would you have to be to think otherwise?

Ban the hammer

2011-06-18T09:53:00.004-04:00

The government of Australia should perhaps follow Canada's example and establish a National Hammer Registry after a Supreme Court judge in Brisbane suggested making carrying a hammer a criminal offence:

In the Supreme Court in Brisbane, Justice Ros Atkinson was taking submissions on the second day of a hearing in which eight men are being sentenced for the bashing death of rugby league star Jonathan Thurston's uncle Richard Saunders.

Prosecutor Todd Fuller, SC, and defence lawyers for the four men and four juveniles completed their submissions on sentence today.

Mr Fuller asked for sentences ranging from 10 years, with an automatic serious violent offence classification meaning eight years must be served, to five years detention with an immediate release order after time served.

Justice Atkinson will sentence all eight on Thursday.

During submissions for a juvenile offender, Justice Atkinson noted that while he was not the one to use the hammer in the attack the juvenile had been carrying a hammer before the events of the night.

"It is such a dangerous thing to do and it is almost inevitable that somebody would be hurt," she said.

Justice Atkinson asked Mr Fuller if there should be legislative reform to make carrying a hammer in such circumstances an offence.

Maybe they could compromise and just register claw hammers or hammers capable of driving nails larger than three inches. After all, if it saves one life ...

Inside the Liberal hive-mind

2011-06-15T19:10:00.005-04:00

Liberal Party of Canada president Alfred Apps gave a speech on June 9 in which he outlined his vision of the future. If anyone needed further proof of the ideological bankruptcy of the former Natural Governing Party, they should look no further.

Mr. Apps begins with a description of the party's roots in the classical liberalism of the 18th and 19th centuries:

The Liberal Party of Canada's core assumptions in politics are about power. We believe that the inexorable progress of mankind, the constant expansion of freedom, demands the ever more democratic disbursal of power. That the primary ongoing role of the state should be to transfer power from the powerful to the less powerful. And because we believe in the primacy of the individual, we think of that power being placed in the hands of individuals to the maximum extent possible.

He then proceeds to negate that very freedom that classical liberalism stands for. Are free individuals really the fundamental units of Canadian society? Not so much, according to Apps. Individuals are important insomuch as they are members of various "marginalized and ignored" groups, which he suggests should be the focus of future Liberal policy:

Just as we need to bring Liberals who have been marginalized and ignored back into the life of our party with a massive outreach exercise, we need to bring Canadians whose agenda has been marginalized and ignored by the current government back into the centre of our political life. This means our aboriginal population, especially the young. Women, especially single mothers and working women with families. New Canadians. The urban poor. Rural and remote Canadians. Those who are fighting for a clean environment and against climate change. People suffering from mental health issues. Volunteer caregivers. All Canadians who believe that Canada's international mission can no longer be undermined by its reputation abroad for how its treats the poorest of citizens within its own borders.

What policies, then, would the future Liberal Party enact to reach out to the powerless? Well, amending the Constitution to include "positive rights" in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, for starters:

Two hundred years after the American Revolution, and more than a century after Confederation, under prime minister Pierre Trudeau, Canada followed the American example and, in 1982, engrafted a Charter of Rights and Freedoms into the Canadian Constitution. Some of these new rights were positive rights -the right to minority language schooling, for example. In order to more properly empower Canadians, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms should be amended to include more positive rights for economic, cultural and social freedom.

As Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, "We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. Necessitous men are not free men." He proposed, but was never able to enact, a bill of rights that would have a guaranteed all Americans' health care, education, housing, and income and retirement security. Roosevelt died a year after making this revolutionary proposal, and the plan died with him.

Canada should take up where he left off, and we have a home-grown example of how to do it. One of the few jurisdictions to have accorded positive economic, social and cultural rights to citizens was Quebec, under the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms enacted by the Bourassa provincial Liberal government in 1975. It guaranteed a range of rights including the right to child care, public education and environmental security. This law only has quasi-constitutional status as it is amendable solely by vote of the Quebec National Assembly. Still, it provides a uniquely Canadian benchmark worthy of reinforcement as we push toward a new frontier of Liberalism.

This is a breathtaking suggestion and, coming from someone who purports to believe in the "primacy of the individual", an amazing example of cognitive dissonance.

Adding "positive rights" like child care, environmental security, housing, and income and retirement security to the Constitution is the exact opposite of empowering individuals. Enshrining them in the Charter creates an obligation for the state to provide these benefits. Massive government bureaucracies would by necessity need to be set up to monitor and run gargantuan state programs for universal child care and housing, and all the other rights suddenly guaranteed by the Constitution. This would remove any incentive for individuals to provide these things for themselves, or for corporations to offer them as benefits to their employees.

It would also create the necessity for pervasive income-redistribution schemes to pay for it all, since individuals would have no incentive any more to pay for them. We would truly be living in a cradle-to-grave nanny state where every aspect of a citizen's life is monitored and managed, and income inequalities are taxed away to "empower the powerless", primacy of the individual be damned. What better way to limit the rights of the individual than to take away his income? And yet, Apps suggests that this can all be done with "fiscal prudence within a mixed market economy in a global marketplace". Nonsense. This vision of Canada's future is only possible in a command economy supported by massive government spending and ruinous taxation. In other words, we would become like post-war Europe and eventually face the decline and collapse that is now unfolding in Greece, Portugal and Spain.

If this is the party president's vision of the future of Canada, then the Liberal Party of Canada is truly a spent force. A party that still worships Franklin Roosevelt and Pierre Trudeau while at the same time claiming to be the guardian of individual liberty can't be taken very seriously.

"Darwin & the arts"

2011-06-07T18:20:00.004-04:00

Raedwald, blogging at Orphans of Liberty, muses on state support of artists:

For years the mediocre, the talentless, the lazy, the deluded and the hubristic have shared in the tax-funds we have pumped into the ‘arts’. The luvvie establishment bought into the trite doctrine of artistic self-definition, as in ‘I’m an artist, therefore anything I create is a work of art’, a doctrine that has filled municipal lobbies, lending libraries, ‘people’s galleries’, redundant churches and scout huts with more artistically worthless, shallow, derivative, clumsy, inept, maladroit, graceless tat and rubbish than a chap on a high mountain could wave a stick at. It’s as if all the anti-talent of Maya Angelou, Jeff Koons and Vladimir Tretchikoff had been marketed by Mohammed Fayed and funded by the Sultan of Brunei.

(HT: David Thompson)

"Everything you've heard about fossil fuels may be wrong"

2011-06-02T16:57:00.001-04:00

From Salon.com:

Are we living at the beginning of the Age of Fossil Fuels, not its final decades? The very thought goes against everything that politicians and the educated public have been taught to believe in the past generation. According to the conventional wisdom, the U.S. and other industrial nations must undertake a rapid and expensive transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy for three reasons: The imminent depletion of fossil fuels, national security and the danger of global warming.

What if the conventional wisdom about the energy future of America and the world has been completely wrong?

As everyone who follows news about energy knows by now, in the last decade the technique of hydraulic fracturing or "fracking," long used in the oil industry, has evolved to permit energy companies to access reserves of previously-unrecoverable “shale gas” or unconventional natural gas. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, these advances mean there is at least six times as much recoverable natural gas today as there was a decade ago.

Natural gas, which emits less carbon dioxide than coal, can be used in both electricity generation and as a fuel for automobiles.

The implications for energy security are startling. Natural gas may be only the beginning. Fracking also permits the extraction of previously-unrecoverable “tight oil,” thereby postponing the day when the world runs out of petroleum. There is enough coal to produce energy for centuries. And governments, universities and corporations in the U.S., Canada, Japan and other countries are studying ways to obtain energy from gas hydrates, which mix methane with ice in high-density formations under the seafloor. The potential energy in gas hydrates may equal that of all other fossils, including other forms of natural gas, combined.

Tim Hudak scores on his own net

2011-05-28T12:56:00.012-04:00

This week Ontario PC leader Tim Hudak announced that if the Conservatives are elected they will institute a policy requiring inmates in provincial prisons to perform 40 hours/week of manual labour:

"I just think it's the right thing to do," Hudak said Thursday. "It's time for inmates to give back to society."

The mandatory labour would include picking up garbage, cleaning graffiti and raking leaves and inmates who refuse to do it would be denied television, card games or other perks, Hudak said.

"A PC government would end the practice of letting convicted prisoners spend their time watching TV or playing cards. We will make work programs mandatory," Hudak said. "I'm not asking prisoners to do anything more than what hard-working Ontario families do everyday — and that is go to work."

I think this is a colossal mistake. Hudak has just handed Dalton McGuinty a club to beat him with in much the same way that John Tory flubbed the religious schools issue in the last provincial election.

Liberals love to portray Conservatives as heartless monsters who would put orphans and pregnant welfare mothers to work in sweatshops to earn their keep, and Hudak has just reinforced this stereotype. It makes him look like Ebenezer Scrooge - prepare yourself for commercials this fall with pictures of Hudak and a voice-over of Alistair Sim muttering "Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?"

Details on whether inmates would be manacled together to prevent escape have yet to be worked out, [Hudak] said.

Is he serious? Are the Conservatives really prepared for Ontario citizens to drive past manacled prisoners in chain gangs picking up trash along the 401 under signs that proudly proclaim "Working for a Better Ontario - Tim Hudak, Premier" while sanctimonious Dalton McGuinty solemnly intones "this is not the compassionate Ontario I believe in"?

Is there really public clamour to make life in prisons harsher for inmates, even among the so-called Conservative base? Was it really necessary for Hudak to look tougher on crime by tightening the screws on people already in jail?

The only thing missing is for Hudak to defend his policy by donning mirrored sunglasses and saying "what we have here is a failure to communicate" while tapping a billy club ominously. Be prepared for that public service message from the Liberals in the fall.

Carthago delenda est

2011-05-03T17:30:00.011-04:00

As I bask in the warm glow of last night's election results, I'm reminded of an episode from ancient history. In the second century BC after two humiliating wars with Carthage, the politicians of Rome agitated for a final decisive campaign against their rival city-state. Cato the Elder ended each of his speeches with the phrase Carthago delenda est - Carthage must be destroyed - and in the Third Punic War victorious Roman armies finally destroyed the city and sowed the surrounding fields with salt so that it would never rise again.

Well, we've had our third electoral war under Prime Minister Harper; Carthage has finally fallen and the enemy lies vanquished on the battlefield. People say that it is a sign of compassion and maturity to be magnanimous in victory. Nonsense. This triumph has been a long time coming, and it's not enough to have defeated Ignatieff; now the Liberal Party must be destroyed.

For decades Liberals have looked with barely concealed contempt across the moats of Rosedale and Westmount and down from the battlements of U of T and UBC at the rest of Canada. They've lectured us on supposed Canadian values while labelling any disagreement with their agenda as racism, homophobia, misogyny or redneck stupidity. They've used their fifth column in the media and cultural sectors to deliberately demonize and belittle our politicians and our policies. They've subjected the "Harper regime" to withering criticism while ignoring malfeasance in their own ranks. They've screamed about the Prime Minister being undemocratic and holding Parliament in contempt, knowing that recent Liberal Prime Ministers ran their own party and the PMO like Tony Soprano ran New Jersey, dispensing patronage to party friends and leaving cash-stuffed envelopes in restaurants for sycophants eager to do business with the government. They whine about civility in politics while their leader pounds the desk and tells Conservatives to "go to hell". They've foisted out-of-touch eggheads and silver-spoon socialists like Stephane Dion, Michael Ignatieff and the Trudeaus pere & fils on us with their cockamamie social engineering and command economy schemes while howling that anyone who questions the Natural Governing Party is un-Canadian. A party with no ideology other than maintaining power has the nerve to call us ideologically driven and label our Prime Minister as scary.

They have for decades systematically dismantled the legacy of a century of Canadian history. Under Liberal leadership, the thousands of Canadian soldiers killed while fighting the most appalling regimes in history and buried in foreign cemeteries became an embarrassing historical footnote - we're a nation of peacekeepers now. Our historic ties to the British Empire and its legacy have all but been erased as relics of racism and colonialism - we're more proud now of our ties to Castro's Cuba. They've worked hard to detach Canada from the United States while sucking up to despotic hell-holes like China and the Soviet Union. A nation that once sat at the table deciding the fate of the post-war world was reduced on their watch to prattling on about "soft power".

But far more insidious has been the unprecedented expansion of the influence of the state in the lives of Canada's citizens and a disturbing erosion of personal liberties under Liberal leadership. There is no aspect of life in Canada now that has not seen its regulation and control by government increased under Liberal rule. Under Liberal administrations, pervasive income-redistribution taxation policies have now made most of the population dependent in some way on the largesse of the state, stifling entrepreneurial spirit and fostering a culture of dependence. We've been told over and over that individuals, parents and families can't be trusted to make intelligent decisions with their own money; that those decisions are best left to the kindly Liberal bureaucrats of the nanny state else we spend it on beer and popcorn.

It has to stop. The Liberal Party must be destroyed and its fields sown with salt. It's leadership must be driven into political exile and it has to spend years in oblivion just to teach it humility. When the Liberal Party realizes that it is not unpatriotic to have a competing vision for the future of Canada, and that Conservatives have a legitimate and equal claim to represent the people as the government of the nation, THEN I'll welcome them back into the political arena. But it's going to to be awhile, and in the meantime I'm going to savour this moment for a long, long time.

Magnanimous in victory? Not bloody likely.

According to my calculations ...

2011-05-03T14:29:00.005-04:00

The Liberal Party will be extinct in 2014. This graph of the number of Liberal seats in the House of Commons for the past five elections tells the story:

(click to enlarge)

The Liberals should form a coalition with the Greens ...

2011-05-03T14:19:00.001-04:00

... one party has MPs with no leader; the other has a leader with no MPs.

Liberal feigned outrage at the "Harper government"

2011-04-05T18:13:00.008-04:00

Remember back in March when Michael Ignatieff was howling with indignation that the Conservatives were using the term "Harper government" in federal publications and on Government of Canada websites?

Federal Liberals are moving swiftly to capitalize on public outrage over Conservative attempts to rebrand the government of Canada as "the Harper government."

They've produced a radio ad that will begin running Saturday in Quebec, expressing shock at the Tories' effrontery in equating the government with Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

"Like you, I am profoundly shocked," Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff says in the ad.

"It's totally unacceptable. The government of Canada is not the government of Mr. Harper, it's the government of citizens, the government of all the citizens of Canada."

Imagine my surprise then, that while reading through the Liberal Party of Canada's platform, I found the current federal government consistently referred to as "the Harper government". Out of curiosity, I counted the number of times the supposedly contentious phrase appears in the document: thirty two.

Like you, I am profoundly shocked. It's totally unacceptable. The government of Canada is not the government of Mr. Harper, it's the government of citizens, the government of all the citizens of Canada.

The Liberals are masters of feigned outrage. As George Burns once said; "Sincerity - if you can fake that, you've got it made."

Name that party

2011-03-21T16:49:00.007-04:00

The Ottawa Citizen has reported on today's resignation of Senator Raymond Lavigne, who finally quit after being convicted of fraud and breach of trust. In light of the feeding frenzy going on in parliamentary committees right now over the government's alleged "contempt of Parliament", it seems odd that nowhere in the Citizen's nine paragraph story does reporter Althia Raj see fit to mention the Senator's party affiliation.

For the record, Senator Lavigne is a Liberal. He was elected as MP for the Quebec riding of Verdun-St Paul in 1993 and again in 1997 and 2000. He was appointed to the Senate by Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien in 2002 to allow former Quebec cabinet minister Liza Frulla to run in his riding for the federal Liberals.

The Citizen does report that "Lavigne, 65, has come under fire for spending $315,355 in travel expenses, on top of his $132,300 salary, despite being barred from doing any work in the Senate or its committees". This is serious unethical behaviour, and it seems to me that people might be curious about how it reflects on the Liberal Party which he represented for years in both the House and the Senate, and indeed the judgment of the Liberal Prime Minister who appointed him to the upper chamber.

The opposition parties, led by the odious Pat Martin, are worked into a lather over the Bev Oda affair and the Government's crime bill. In both cases, the Citizen didn't hesitate to identify the political party involved. Reporting on the crime bill, the Citizen mentioned not only the Conservative Party but also its leader:

The release of hundreds of pages of federal documents on Wednesday has sparked new warnings from opposition parties that they are losing confidence in Stephen Harper's minority government for not sharing enough details about the price of its agenda.

Facing accusations of contempt of Parliament, the Tory government released the thick binder of notes that reveal over $600 million in new spending estimates associated with its heavy law-and-order agenda.

On the Bev Oda issue, the Citizen reports:

Federal politicians have approved a plan to draft a report finding the minority Conservative government in contempt of Parliament, setting the stage for a confidence motion that could provoke an election.

Let's call together a parliamentary committee and put Michael Ignatieff on the hot seat. He's the leader of the Liberal Party; what did he know about l'affaire Lavigne, and when did he know it? Contempt of parliament indeed.

And while we're at it, let's get Althia Raj to testify why she doesn't think it's important that readers know that Raymond Lavigne is a Liberal.

Politically correct dilemma: does Islamophobia trump homophobia?

2011-03-15T15:06:00.003-04:00

A few weeks ago in the UK, stickers appeared in various locations around London's East End proclaiming it a "gay free zone" and quoting passages from the Koran. In response, gay rights campaigners in London have organized East End Gay Pride and plan to march through the neighbourhood on April 2. Said one of the organizers: "We simply want to say: ‘Hang on. You’re wrong. The East End is NOT a gay-free zone’.”

So what's a politically correct gay activist to do when forced to choose between conflicting gay and Islamist agendas? Cry "Islamophobia", of course. The organizers of East End Pride have now been urged by members of London's gay community to cancel the parade for fear of "scapegoating Muslims":

The march, to be held on April 2nd, has been organised by six friends as a response to anti-gay stickers plastered around the East End.

But opponents say it is an “emotional reaction” which “risks antagonising and scapegoating” Muslims.

...

Although the parade has been backed by local police and Tower Hamlets council, some local campaigners are calling for it to be cancelled.

An open letter signed by Out East chair Thierry Schaffauser and Terry Stewart of the Hackney Community Engagement Board claims that the Pride march may “divide our communities” or be used “to oppress other marginalised groups”.

Out East organises Hackney Pride and the letter has also been signed by Denis Fernando of Unite Against Fascism and the Greater London Association of Trade Union Councils.

It says: “We believe that the most appropriate response to the stickers is to liaise with Muslim communities and others to create bridges and communicate with each other.

“We want both homophobia and Islamophobia addressed as a collective problem and not feed one against the other, we do not recognise these as distinct categories.

“We will refuse any attempt to divide our communities or take the risk that an LGBTQ event is used to oppress other marginalised groups, in particular LGBTQ Muslims who will be the most affected by this rising antagonism.”

Unbelievable.

$4 a gallon gas? I wish

2011-03-09T17:29:00.007-05:00

The price of gasoline in the U.S. is now hovering around US$4.00 per gallon, and pundits and politicians are screaming for the government to do something about it. Release crude oil from the Strategic Oil Reserve! Lower federal taxes! ANYTHING to ease the consumer pain of expensive gas. Nothing like this ever happens in Canada; we quietly put up with similar prices that we consider "normal", and no one utters a peep except Liberal MP Dan McTeague who pops up with tiresome regularity denouncing "speculators".

Four dollar a gallon gas in Canada? I wish. I filled my tank up today with regular gasoline at a price of CAN$1.179/liter. At 3.785 liter to the U.S. liquid gallon, and at today's Bank of Canada exchange rate of US$1.03/CAN$, that works out to US$4.59 per U.S. gallon. $4.59! There would be civil unrest in Los Angeles at those prices.

Even at prices that Canadians would consider reasonable, say CAN$1.02/liter, the equivalent American price would be - get this - US$4.00/gallon.

The difference between Canadian and US gas prices is of course taxation. Gas is taxed at exhorbitantly high rates north of the border, but Canadians don't seem to mind. In typical Canuck fashion, we meekly accept that it is our patriotic duty to pay higher taxes.

So I'm planning to take my vacation road trip to the U.S. this summer. No matter what the price of gas is down there, it will be a bargain compared to driving around Canada.

Libertarianism explained in two minutes

2011-03-03T19:28:00.003-05:00

Dr. Jeffrey Miron of Harvard University explains libertarianism in this two minute video. A sample:

The liberal and conservative perspectives are fundamentally different than the libertarian perspective, which is really unique. Liberals and conservatives are at some level the same; they are authoritarians. They both have views on the right way for people to run their lives, and they want to impose that on people, whereas libertarians want to let people choose for themselves how to run their lives rather than having government tell people that there's one right way to do things and other ways that are not legitimate.

Miron must be pretty lonely at Harvard.

(HT: Reason Online)

Gays, straights & conservatives

2011-02-15T17:16:00.002-05:00

Greg Gutfeld, blogging at Big Hollywood, has this to say on the subject of gays in the conservative movement:

...If you want to argue against homosexuality, you need to move it beyond religion. Fact is, if I get mugged, I can explain to the police why the mugger must be arrested – without saying “it’s in the Ten Commandments.”

After all, pointing to God as the basis for your distaste is what our enemies do every time they try to blow us up. We’re better than that.

Gay equality: "logically coherent from a conservative POV"

2011-02-14T19:38:00.004-05:00

Nick Gillespie of Reason Magazine has commented about the dustup at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington over the participation of GOProud, an organization of gay Republicans. The conference was boycotted by several social conservative groups who believe that it is impossible to be a fiscal conservative without also being a social conservative. Gillespie writes:

As a libertarian, I'm in no way tied to CPAC (did speak there a couple of years ago and have attended from time to time), but it's fascinating to me that the conservative movement can't recognize some elemental facts. First and foremost that the world they're trying to create, especially when it comes to intolerance of alternative lifestyles, is never going to happen. And that by insisting, as Sen. James DeMint and Rep. Jim Jordan have, that you can't be a fiscal conservative without being a social conservative, you're alienating all those independents who just might give the GOP a second chance at running the federal budget. And you're in open denial of reality: A person's choice of sexual partner in no way means he or she can't be in favor of less spending on farm subsidies. There's a stunning knot of bull-dinkey at the heart of the argument that tolerance equals uncritical embrace. Do conservatives, of all people, think that the state allowing all religions to practice means official endorsement?

...

Maybe, baby, just maybe. Conservatives should recognize a few things. First, as Clouthier suggests, the fiscal con wing was exposed as just that, a total con job. Under Bush and a supposedly conservative Congress, federal outlays jacked up about 60 percent in real terms. Second, defense cons blew it. They had two wars to show themselves as effective, and they screwed the pooch, wagged the dog, shat the bed, whatever. After a good, long ride at the top, they did nothing well. They didn't create a coherent foreign policy that suggests when the U.S. might intervene and when it shouldn't (the Global War on Terrorism is not simply vague, it provides no stopping point for Wilsonian interventionism, which is decidedly not conservative). And third, social cons have lost, period. Gays are not going back in the closet and demands for equal standing under the law are logically coherent from a conservative POV. Gays didn't destroy marriage or the family (neither of which is in ruins, by the way, but that's another issue). The same goes for drug legalization, which has been touted by such raging liberals as William F. Buckley. In terms of abortion, like it or not, the country has settled into a semi-easy truce that abortion earlier in a pregnancy is OK and the closer the mother comes to term, the less comfortable people feel with it. In any case, advances in contraception and reproductive technologies will almost certainly render such decisions moot as people have gain ever-vaster control of their bodies.

In a historical way, libertarianism predates post-war conservatism. Libertarianism, with its emphasis on individual freedom, conscience, and responsibility, is the direct descendant of the classical liberalism that grew out of the English Civil War of the mid-17th century and worked its way through the Scottish Enlightenment, the Austrian economists, and others. It seeks to shrink to sphere of the state to that of an impartial judge protecting the equal rights of citizens and it valorizes, as Reason's motto puts it, "Free Minds and Free Markets." Sociologically, however, libertarianism has long been seen as a lesser brother to postwar conservatism, "chirping sectaries" in Russell Kirk's dismissive phrase, with about as much potential for leadership as Fredo Corleone.

That's no longer the case, dear conservatives. I'm no triumphalist but everything in the past 40 years suggests that the old-style left-wing command and control models have been thoroughly vanquished in theory if not practice (even old Europe has sold off virtually all of its state monopolies!). And the conservative desire for control of individuals' desire and lifestyles has similary come a cropper; your actual champions in the highest positions in the world have tried your ideas and been found wanting (who can disagree that George W. Bush was a "big-government disaster"?). In a world of increasing decentralization of power and corresponding growth in individual autonomy, libertarianism is looking better and better, both as a description of what's happening in those parts of our lives not completely under the thumb of government and as a guide to minimizing the reach of the state where it still is too grabby.

Social conservatives: "phony solutions for real social ills"

2011-02-07T17:42:00.005-05:00

David Boaz writes in the LA Times about the contradiction between the problems that socons identify in society and their proposals to solve them:

Social conservatives say they're trying to address the problems of family breakdown, crime and welfare costs, but there's a huge disconnect between the problems they identify and the policy solutions they propose. It's almost like the man who looked for his keys on the thoroughfare, even though he lost them in the alley, because the light was better.

Social conservatives tend to talk about issues such as abortion and gay rights, stem cell research and the role of religion "in the public square": "Those who would have us ignore the battle being fought over life, marriage and religious liberty have forgotten the lessons of history," said Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) at the Family Research Council's 2010 Values Voter Summit.

But what, exactly, are the policy problems they say they aim to solve?

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, at the same summit, said: "We need to understand there is a direct correlation between the stability of families and the stability of our economy…. The real reason we have poverty is we have a breakdown of the basic family structure." And Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) said: "It's impossible to be a fiscal conservative unless you're a social conservative because of the high cost of a dysfunctional society."

Those are reasonable concerns. As a 2009 Heritage Foundation report stated, children born to single mothers "score lower on tests, have increased chances for committing a crime, have higher chances of living in poverty, experience more emotional and behavioral problems, are more likely to abuse drugs or alcohol and have higher chances of becoming pregnant as teens." And social problems like that do tend to lead to higher government spending.

But those problems have nothing to do with abortion or gay marriage, the issues that social conservatives talk most about.

...

When Huckabee says that "a breakdown of the basic family structure" is causing poverty — and thus a demand for higher government spending — he knows that he's really talking about unwed motherhood, divorce, children growing up without fathers and the resulting high rates of welfare usage and crime. Those also make up the "high cost of a dysfunctional society" that worries DeMint.

But the "Family Values" section of DeMint's Senate website talks about abortion and gay marriage, along with adoption. There's no mention of divorce or unwed motherhood.

...

Reducing the incidence of unwed motherhood, divorce, fatherlessness, welfare and crime would be a good thing. So why the focus on issues that would do nothing to solve the "breakdown of the basic family structure" and the resulting "high cost of a dysfunctional society"? Well, solving the problems of divorce and unwed motherhood is hard. And lots of Republican and conservative voters have been divorced. A constitutional amendment to ban divorce wouldn't go over very well, even with the social conservatives. Far better to pick on a small group, a group not perceived to be part of the Republican constituency, and blame it for social breakdown and its associated costs.

That's why social conservatives point to a real problem and then offer phony solutions.

But you won't find your keys on the thoroughfare if you dropped them in the alley, and you won't reduce the costs of social breakdown by keeping gays unmarried and preventing them from adopting orphans.

Ronald Reagan: "the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism"

2011-02-06T15:34:00.003-05:00

From a 1975 interview with Reason magazine, Ronald Reagan talks about his vision of conservatism:

REASON: Governor Reagan, you have been quoted in the press as saying that you’re doing a lot of speaking now on behalf of the philosophy of conservatism and libertarianism. Is there a difference between the two?

REAGAN: If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals–if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is.

Now, I can’t say that I will agree with all the things that the present group who call themselves Libertarians in the sense of a party say, because I think that like in any political movement there are shades, and there are libertarians who are almost over at the point of wanting no government at all or anarchy. I believe there are legitimate government functions. There is a legitimate need in an orderly society for some government to maintain freedom or we will have tyranny by individuals. The strongest man on the block will run the neighborhood. We have government to insure that we don’t each one of us have to carry a club to defend ourselves. But again, I stand on my statement that I think that libertarianism and conservatism are travelling the same path.

Imperialism's heritage

2011-02-02T16:45:00.008-05:00

One of the most distressing things to come out of the unrest in Egypt is the news that rioters had broken into the Egyptian Museum of Antiquities in Cairo and looted some of its priceless artifacts. It makes one wonder whether impassioned pleas to return artifacts and works of art taken during the colonial era should be ignored in the case of potentially unstable countries like Egypt.

The break-in at Cairo's Egyptian Museum could have been a disaster of historic proportions, a repeat of the rape of Baghdad's multi-millennial heritage after Iraq's equivalent museum was looted in 2003. It wasn't. But only thanks to sheer dumb luck.

On Friday, Egypt's government declared a 6 p.m.-to-7 a.m. curfew. The much detested riot police, who had fired tear gas and rubber bullets at protesters all day, suddenly withdrew from the streets at around the start of the curfew, including from their positions guarding Cairo's famed antiquities museum in the heart of the capital, on Tahrir Square, which is the epicenter of the uprising against President Hosni Mubarak. Immediately, Egypt became a police state without police.

The museum had been closed all day because of the street demonstrations, but after virtually all police abandoned their posts, "people began to enter the museum," says Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt's antiquities department. They climbed over walls, forced open doors and entered the museum's vast souvenir shop. "I'm glad that those people were idiots," Hawass told TIME. "They looted the museum shop. Thank God they thought that the museum shop was the museum."

...

While many of the intruders were dazzled by the souvenir shop, a few others knew there was more to the museum. Nine of them apparently realized that the real treasures were elsewhere. They entered a room containing artifacts dating back to 500 B.C. The intruders broke into some 13 glass panel display cases as well as one case in the Tutankahmun exhibition. Hawass did not give TIME permission to view the destruction in the museum, which has been shut for the duration of the crisis. But video footage from several Arabic satellite networks, including al-Arabiya, showed shards of glass littering the floor and several artifacts carelessly tossed around, some resting on splinters, others hanging out of display cases. "They were looking for gold," Hawass told TIME, just like the grave robbers of old.

The military, which has taken over security duties throughout Cairo and in many other cities, did not arrive on the scene until 10 p.m. In the meantime, ordinary Cairenes, aware of the security vacuum, flocked to protect the museum. "That was wonderful," says Hawass. "The Cairo museum is like the place for our identity. If the museum is safe, Egypt is safe."

The citizens, as well as three police officers who refused to leave their posts, apprehended the nine alleged culprits as they tried to flee the museum with their loot, including two mummy skulls and a statue of Isis. Hawass says that nothing is missing from the museum although about 100 items were damaged — though not irreparably. "They're easy to restore," he says.

The incident recalls a more serious event that happened in Baghdad in 2003 when mobs looted the Baghdad Museum after the fall of Saddam Hussein, carrying away priceless artifacts by the wheelbarrow-load and destroying countless others.

Hussein made an official request to Germany for the return of Babylon's Ishtar Gate to Iraq in 2002, a year before the Baghdad Museum was looted. Fortunately, the gate remains safe and sound in Berlin's Pergamon Museum.

Returning artifacts to their country of origin has been somewhat of an obsession lately. Just a week before the unrest in Cairo broke out, Egypt's top archeologist had issued a formal request to the German government for the return of the famous bust of Nefertiti, which is housed in Berlin's Neues Museum.

Egypt's top archaeologist has formally requested the return of the 3,300-year-old bust of Queen Nefertiti that has been in a Berlin museum for decades, the latest move in his eight-year-old campaign to bring home ancient artifacts spirited out of the country during colonial times.

The bust dates back to the time of the 14th century B.C. queen and tops Egypt's wish list of artifacts that Zahi Hawass wants to see back home. The bust is currently at Berlin's Neues Museum.

...

Germany has declined past Egyptian requests for the bust's return, saying it was in Germany legally and is too fragile to move. But Egypt contends it was taken out with fraudulent documents in 1913.

What would have happened to this bust if it had been returned to Cairo and looters had managed to find it? It's only sheer luck that Egyptian artifacts like Tutankhamun's gold death mask weren't found and destroyed by the mob that trashed the museum last week.

Yale University recently agreed to return priceless Inca artifacts from Machu Picchu that have been in its possession since 1915. Peru is a politically unstable country that has been fighting a war against leftist insurgents since the 1980s that is far from resolved. What would happen to this irreplaceable collection if the capital was overrun by Shining Path guerrillas doesn't take much imagination.

Britain, so far, has resisted increasing pressure from Greece to return the Elgin Marbles - the sculptures taken from the Parthenon in 1816 and now housed in the British Museum. Considering the turmoil that has wracked Greece in the succeeding two hundred years and the recent rioting in Athens in response to the government's austerity measures, it's not a stretch to suggest that the statues might have been better off in London all along.

The art and artifacts taken by imperialist collectors that are housed in various museums around the world represent the collective heritage of world civilization. We all have an interest in their preservation. Sometimes the best thing is to keep them where they are, preserved and studied by curators with resources and expertise, in politically stable countries with the means and the will to protect them. Countries whose own people would loot and destroy their heritage don't deserve to have these works returned.

A frightening glimpse at "gay rights activism" in Egypt

2011-01-26T17:17:00.007-05:00

The Jerusalem Post profiles Egyptian Ahmed Saad, self-proclaimed "gay rights activist". His solution (a final solution, as it were) to the problem of persecution of homosexuals in the Islamic world? Give gays an opportunity to go straight, and if they refuse - kill them.

Hostility towards homosexuality has deep roots in Islamic culture and tradition, and many Muslims believe that it constitutes a crime warranting execution. Saad asserts, however, that this attitude represents a blatant misunderstanding of Koranic text: “God,” he insists, “sentenced the homosexuals to death [at Sodom and Gomorrah] only after they refused his guidance.”

From Saad’s point of view, refusal to change is the true transgression – not homosexuality itself. He believes that every homosexual deserves a second opportunity to be straight.

“DON’T FORGET that homosexuals exist among those closest to you and need your help,” implores Saad as an author’s note in his first book, Shab Takaya, published by Al- Alamiya last month. (The title translates literally as “pillow boy” and is a derogatory term for homosexuals; the author uses it as a criticism of the society that stigmatizes them.)

The story begins when a young boy named Haytham is mysteriously found hanging from a rope in his room as part of what initially appears to be suicide. As the tale progresses, the novel’s nameless protagonist – a journalist like Saad himself, whose speech Saad says reflects his own views – seeks to uncover details surrounding Haytham’s death. Saad uses his protagonist’s journey to explore – and condemn – the treatment of homosexuals in Egyptian society.

Yet the extent to which Saad actually defends homosexuals remains a matter of interpretation, which explains why since the book’s publication, Saad has received threats and insults from heterosexuals and homosexuals alike. His book argues for societal acceptance of homosexuals and an end to stigmatization.

Nonetheless, Saad envisions an Islamic society that treats homosexuality as a curable illness. “Society has a critical role to play in treatment,” writes Saad’s anonymous protagonist, as “any disease, whether physical or psychological, demands support from society and especially from the patient’s close relatives.” Without “the right kind” of support, “the patient’s frustration grows” until he surrenders himself to the disease.

Convinced that their lifestyles are unhealthy and go against God, Saad said in a recent interview that most homosexuals would seek treatment if provided a supportive atmosphere and the opportunity to do so. As to the minority who refuse treatment because they believe in exercising what the West calls individual liberty, most can be disabused of such ideas, he argued. For the remainder, his words were harsh: “As Sodom and Gomorrah’s homosexuals were executed for failing to heed God’s words, so should homosexuals be ‘stoned to death,’ as decreed by Islam, if they refuse to change.”

“The homosexual does not live alone by himself in society,” asserted Saad, whose small build and reserved demeanor bely the determination with which he conveys his message. “If [a homosexual] is freely left to practice his sexuality openly and without shame, he endangers society in its entirety. He will influence children and infect them with his disease.”

Saad gained his insight by "pretending to be gay" and trolling a gay dating website to meet Egyptian men:

Saad said he based his characters on what he saw and heard from people he met through manjam.com, a dating site popular among gay Egyptians. Since he could not present himself as a journalist because no one would agree to talk with him, he said he pretended to be gay himself – a deception he considered “the only way possible” to meet gays in person and learn about their lives.

Sure, buddy - whatever you say.

(HT: Box Turtle Bulletin)

"Moral relativism finally taken to its logical conclusion"

2011-01-22T15:24:00.003-05:00

Blogging at PJM, Zombie considers an astonishing article from the Guardian:

The Guardian recently published a wicked satire of moral relativism, a Swiftian send-up entitled “End human rights imperialism now” with the classic sub-heading “Groups such as Human Rights Watch have lost their way by imposing western, ‘universal’ standards on developing countries.” Brilliant! Hahahahaha! I didn’t know the Guardian had branched out into humor.

But about five minutes after my laughter subsided, a horrible suspicion dawned on me: Could it be that the author was serious?

A quick re-read confirmed my fears. This was no joke. This was the modern left finally taking its last inevitable step into the abyss of moral oblivion.

Read it and weep.

Walmart & fat people

2011-01-19T17:16:00.013-05:00

The Ottawa Citizen is carrying a story today about a study done at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro that claims to conclusively prove that Walmart is responsible for making poor people fat.

Two economists tracked extensive health and population data between 1996 and 2005, a period in which 1,569 supercentres — which sell groceries along with household products — opened across the U.S.

Of Walmart's 323 stores in Canada, 119 are supercentres.

The researchers found that one new Walmart supercentre per 100,000 residents meant an average weight gain of 1.5 pounds per person sometime over a 10-year period dating from the store's opening. It also boosted the obesity rate by 2.3 percentage points, meaning that for every 100 people, two who weren't obese ended up in that category after a superstore opened.

"I think the most obvious story is that Walmart lowers the price of foods and a lot of the foods it has big price advantages on are the processed, inner-aisle types of food that aren't that good for you," said Charles Courtemanche, an assistant professor of economics at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

"It's not just about Walmart underselling the competitor. It's about the competitors cutting their prices in response to competition from Walmart. Someone might never step foot in a Walmart, but they still might pay less for their food."

Women, low-income families and people living in less densely populated areas are those most likely to put on weight after the arrival of a supercentre, according to Courtemanche and his co-author, Art Carden at Rhodes College.

The researchers incorporated a variety of controls and tests in their study to ensure that other characteristics of the communities studied could not have explained the weight gain.

While the most obvious explanation is that cheaper food leads to more eating, Courtemanche said further research is needed to determine the exact connection between Walmart supercentres and obesity. It could be a combination of diet and exercise, he said, noting that their previous research has shown Walmart's product offerings influence leisure activities — with people buying and watching more DVDs, for instance, after a Walmart moves into town and offers them cheaply.

It's also possible that prices drop more steeply on processed foods than they do on fresh fruit and vegetables after Walmart's arrival, he suggested. Previous research has estimated that Walmart causes prices to drop by between eight and 27 per cent across the board, he said.

"We don't want people to look at this and immediately say Walmart is evil. We want people to realize this is one of many things that are going on, and maybe some are good and some are bad," he said. "Certainly our results should not be taken as, 'Ban all Walmarts.' It's part of a very broad debate."

I find this study infuriating on a number of levels. From the purely scientific perspective, it sets off a number of alarm bells. Correlation does not imply causation; the opening of a Walmart Supercentre in a community and the rise of obesity rates are not necessarily connected. Followers of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster poke fun at this logical fallacy with their dogma that the declining number of pirates since 1800 is the cause of global warming, which of course is also a statistical correlation. The Walmart researchers claim that they "incorporated a variety of controls and tests in their study to ensure that other characteristics of the communities studied could not have explained the weight gain", but I'm still skeptical. The full paper is here if you want to wade through the statistics, but I'm not convinced that the rise in the obesity rate over the period under study is not a result of, say, a general society-wide increase in sedentary life-styles which is independent of the increase in the number of Walmart Supercentres.

But that's not the aspect of the study that I find most annoying; it's the conclusion that Walmart's business model of "everyday low prices" should be inaccessible to poor people. It would be far better, goes the thinking, if food prices were kept artificially high because then the poor couldn't afford to overeat. They would be kept in an environment of artificial food shortage and therefore on a more restrictive diet, and those nasty pounds would just melt away. After all, it was rare to find obese peasants working in the dirt around the manor house in the 14th Century when food for them was a luxury.

And those cheap DVDs that the grubby slobs love to buy at Walmart and then take home to watch on the sofa while stuffing their pie holes with Cheetos? Remember the good old days when the working stiffs staggered home from the mines and collapsed from exhaustion? No time for DVDs then, I'll bet. Wasn't the working class so wonderfully SLIM back then?

People like the authors of this study and the pundits who are tut-tutting over its conclusions don't trust poor people to make decisions with their own money. Bring a Walmart into their blighted neighbourhoods and they might spend the money they'd save on beer and popcorn instead of health-club memberships and triathlon entry fees. Heaven forbid! The peasants must be kept thin by inflating the cost of their food, and kept active by denying them sedentary leisure activities that would consequently only be available to their wealthier betters. I find this attitude despicable.

The arrival of a Walmart store in an economically depressed community is good for the poor. It lowers the cost of food, clothing and other necessities for already cash-strapped customers. Walmart hires low-skilled workers that would otherwise be unemployable. They pay corporate taxes to municipal governments with devastated industrial tax bases.

As Radley Balko pointed out at the Daily Beast:

The mere presence of a Wal-Mart in a community results in the equivalent of a 6.5 percent increase in annual income, which, as The Washington Post’s Sebastian Mallaby has pointed out, makes the store a bigger boon to the poor than the federal government’s food-stamps program. And Carden and Courtemanche began their study before Wal-Mart began its $4 prescription drug program, which also delivers a big potential health benefit both to Wal-Mart customers and other consumers in the area, because many competing stores were moved to implement similar programs.

...

Every time Wal-Mart tries to open a store in a big city like Chicago, Los Angeles, or New York, it encounters a storm of protest from politicians, labor unions and activist groups who claim to speak for the poor and low-wage workers. Los Angeles City Councilwoman Jan Perry, who proposed the one-year moratorium on new fast-food restaurants on L.A.’s south side to combat childhood obesity, also in 2004, backed a bill to keep Wal-Mart out of that same community.

In Chicago in 2006, a proposed Wal-Mart store met with fierce opposition from groups critical of its labor practices—a position just reiterated by Mayor Richard Daley. So instead, Wal-Mart opened in Evergreen Park, one block outside the Chicago city limits. The store received 24,500 job applications for just 325 positions, and now generates more than $1 million per year in taxes for the small town while boosting revenue for local businesses.

Had Chicago’s politicians not been so obstinate, that economic windfall could have been enjoyed by the city’s low-income, mostly minority Chatham neighborhood—whose residents might have dropped some pounds as well.

Walmart drives nanny-state liberals nuts. They would prefer that the poor and the working class be kept in a condition of dependence on the all-knowing government, and everyday low prices just don't fit the master plan. The modern Marie Antoinettes of the welfare state look down their noses at the fat proletariat outside the gates of Versailles and sneer "Don't let them eat cake".

Banned in Canada? Seriously?

2011-01-13T17:32:00.012-05:00

On behalf of sensible gay Dire Straits fans everywhere, I humbly apologize for the actions of a gay radio listener in Newfoundland who has succeeded in getting the song "Money for Nothing" banned in Canada:

Money For Nothing, a classic-rock radio staple by Dire Straits, is too offensive for Canadian broadcasts because of its use of the word “faggot,” the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council has ruled.

The ruling, released Wednesday, responded to a complaint submitted to St. John’s radio station CHOZ-FM over a Feb. 1 airing of an unedited version of the song, which mentions the word three times.

The complainant wrote that the song’s lyrics were “extremely offensive” to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

A 25 yr old song has now been sent down the memory hole because of a single complaint - one - from an offended gay listener.

For the record, I am a member of the tribe described in the complaint as "gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people". I am also a Dire Straits fan, and I have this to say to Mr. Lighten Up in Newfoundland; you don't know what you're talking about. If you paid any attention to the lyrics that sent you into a hissy fit, you would realize that the use of the word "faggot" in the song is ironic and is actually poking fun at homophobes who use the word as an insult.

The song describes a supposed conversation between two blue-collar working men who make a living delivering and installing refrigerators and microwave ovens. They are watching rock videos on MTV and lamenting the fact that the band on TV (presumably Dire Straits)is making obscene amounts of money by prancing around and playing guitars ("money for nothing") while they slave away doing hard physical labour for pitiful wages. They are particularly incensed by someone in the band with outlandish hair and an earring whom they presume is a "faggot" and thus doesn't deserve to be rich and famous while they languish in obscurity:

Now look at them yo-yo's that's the way you do it
You play the guitar on the MTV
That ain't workin' that's the way you do it
Money for nothin' and your chicks for free
Now that ain't workin' that's the way you do it
Lemme tell ya them guys ain't dumb
Maybe get a blister on your little finger
Maybe get a blister on your thumb

We gotta install microwave ovens
Custom kitchen deliveries
We gotta move these refrigerators
We gotta move these color TV's

(See the little faggot with the earring and the makeup
Yeah buddy that's his own hair
That little faggot got his own jet airplane
That little faggot he's a millionaire)

Gotta install microwave ovens
Custom kitchen deliveries
We gotta move these refrigerators
Gotta move these color TV's

I shoulda learned to play the guitar
I shoulda learned to play them drums
Look at that mama, she got it stickin' in the camera
Man we could have some
And he's up there, what's that? Hawaiian noises?
Bangin' on the bongos like a chimpanzee
That ain't workin' that's the way you do it
Get your money for nothin' get your chicks for free

We gotta install microwave ovens
Custom kitchens deliveries
We gotta move these refrigerators
We gotta move these color TV's

Look a' here
That ain't workin' that's the way you do it
You play the guitar on your MTV
That ain't workin' that's the way you do it
Money for nothin' and your chicks for free
Money for nothin' and chicks for free

Money for nothin' and your chicks for free

Look at that, look at that

Money for nothin' and your chicks for free
I want my, I want my, I want my MTV
Money for nothin' and chicks for free

Clearly the song is meant to satirize the narrow-mindedness of people who would use the word "faggot" as an insult and is not intended to offend actual gay people. I'm as offended as any gay person when that slur is used around me and it can be very hurtful, but in this case by putting the word in the mouth of a bigot, it is a way to negatively stereotype the users of the insult, not the targets. In that sense it is empowering, not insulting.

As Kelly McParland put it in the National Post: has Canada become the world's thinnest-skinned country?

You may have noticed the global snort of derision when it became known that Money For Nothing, a 25-year-old Dire Straits song written by Mark Knopfler and Sting, has been ruled too offensive for Canadian radio play.

What’s interesting, apart from the simple lunacy of suddenly banning a tune that’s 25 years old and has already been played about a billion times, is the reason: A radio station in St. John’s received a complaint.

That’s all it takes in Canada: One person to take offense.

...

Minority rights are fine and all, but when did it become the practice that, in a country of 34 million people, a single person could overrule all the others simply by declaring they were offended?

I would suggest that the one person responsible for this ridiculous decision is not only offended but clueless, and the people at the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council should be embarrassed for caving in.

UPDATE: Mark Knopfler commented on the same controversy in a 1985 interview with Rolling Stone:

The layers of irony in "Money for Nothing" have certainly confused people. I got an objection from the editor of a gay newspaper in London - he actually said it was "below the belt." Apart from the fact that there are stupid gay people as well as stupid other people, it suggests that maybe you can't let it have so many meanings - you have to be direct. (HT: Towleroad)

A sensible court decision on gay marriage vs religious freedom

2011-01-10T18:12:00.002-05:00

The Saskatchewan Court of Appeal has ruled that civil marriage commissioners cannot refuse to marry gay couples on the basis of personal religious beliefs. The Toronto Sun has the details:

A Saskatchewan court has determined that, regardless of personal religious beliefs, civil commissioners in the province must marry gay couples when asked to do so.

Following proposed legislation that would allow provincial officials the right to refuse to perform marriages that conflict with their religious beliefs, the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal was asked to rule on whether the very idea of such amendments would be constitutional.

They're not.

The court found that civil ceremonies free of religious implication are exactly that: free of the influence of religion.

The court also found that people who assume roles in public offices are bound to the rules governing those offices.

"Persons who voluntarily choose to assume an office, like that of a marriage commissioner, cannot expect to directly shape the office's intersection with the public so as to make it conform with their personal religious or other beliefs," the court wrote in its decision.

"In our tradition, the apparatus of the state serves everyone equally without providing better, poorer or different services to one individual compared to another by making distinctions on the basis of factors like race, religion or gender."

To allow civil commissioners to refuse to perform marriages solely on their personal religious grounds, the court ruled, "would violate the equality rights of gay and lesbian individuals."

I think the Court has made the correct decision here. The marriage commissioners involved in the case were not asked to perform a religious marriage ceremony in a private church, but to officiate at a civil ceremony in a public place. The laws of Canada say that it is legal for gay couples to marry - if a functionary of the state cannot in good conscience enforce the law, then he should resign his position.

I fully support allowing churches and religious organizations to refuse to perform gay marriages - after all, churches are private organizations(although their tax-exempt status implies a level of state support). Membership in a church is voluntary; no one is forced to belong and members are free to leave if they disagree with a point of doctrine.

However, citizenship is not voluntary - citizens are obligated to obey the constitutional laws enacted by duly elected representatives. One cannot pick and choose which laws to enforce and which to refuse.

No sensible gay couple wants to force reluctant or hostile churches to perform their marriages, but gay couples who wish to marry have only one legal alternative to a religious wedding - a civil ceremony performed by a non-religious state official. That a secular state official would refuse to provide this perfectly legal service is a violation of the civil rights of the couple wishing to marry. No one is asking the commissioners in question to change their religious beliefs or for their churches to change their doctrine; all they are being asked to do is their jobs.

We would not tolerate a white supremacist commissioner refusing to marry black or mixed-race couples, or a Muslim commissioner refusing to marry a Muslim and a Jew. This case is no different.

"Piltdown medicine": anti-vaccine quackery exposed

2011-01-06T17:19:00.003-05:00

Respectful Insolence has an exhaustive post on the revelation that anti-vaccine crusader Andrew Wakefield's "research" linking autism to the MMR vaccine was a complete fraud:

Pity poor Andrew Wakefield.

2010 was a terrible year for him, and 2011 is starting out almost as bad. In February 2010, the General Medical Council in the U.K. recommended that Wakefield be stripped of his license to practice medicine in the U.K. because of scientific misconduct related to his infamous 1998 case series published in The Lancet, even going so far as to refer to him as irresponsible and dishonest, and in May 2010 he was. This case series, thanks to Wakefield's scientific incompetence and fraud, coupled with his flair for self-promotion and enabled by the sensationalistic credulity of the British press, ignited a scare about the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine in which, afraid that the MMR vaccine causes autism, parents in the U.K. eschewed vaccinating their children in droves. As a result, vaccination rates plummeted far below the level necessary for herd immunity, with the entirely predictable result of massive measles outbreaks in the U.K. Measles, which as of the mid-1990s had been declared under control by British and European health authorities, came roaring back to the point where in 2008 it was declared once again endemic in the British Isles. In a mere decade and a half, several decades of progress in controlling this scourge had been unravelled like a thread hanging off a cheap dress, all thanks to Andrew Wakefield and scandal mongers in the British press.

Wakefield is personally responsible for the deaths of children whose parents refused to vaccinate them based on his fraudulent claims. Shameful.

The Poetry of DH Rumsfeld

2011-01-03T19:21:00.004-05:00

Slate finds some quirky beauty in the Pentagon press briefings of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld:

Rumsfeld's poetry is paradoxical: It uses playful language to address the most somber subjects: war, terrorism, mortality. Much of it is about indirection and evasion: He never faces his subjects head on but weaves away, letting inversions and repetitions confuse and beguile. His work, with its dedication to the fractured rhythms of the plainspoken vernacular, is reminiscent of William Carlos Williams'. Some readers may find that Rumsfeld's gift for offhand, quotidian pronouncements is as entrancing as Frank O'Hara's.

A sample:

The Unknown

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

The Homosexual Bourgeoisie

2011-01-03T17:21:00.004-05:00

Jonah Goldberg writes at National Review Online that "transgressive" gay culture has been "digested by the mainstream bourgeois order", and that's a good thing:

Two decades ago, the gay Left wanted to smash the bourgeois prisons of monogamy, capitalistic enterprise, and patriotic values and bask in the warm sun of bohemian “free love” and avant-garde values. In this, they were simply picking up the torch from the straight Left of the 1960s and 1970s, who had sought to throw off the sexual hang-ups of their parents’ generation along with their gray flannel suits.

As a sexual-lifestyle experiment, they failed pretty miserably, the greatest proof being that the affluent and educated children (and grandchildren) of the baby boomers have re-embraced the bourgeois notion of marriage as an essential part of a successful life. Sadly, it’s the lower-middle class that increasingly sees marriage as an out-of-reach luxury. The irony is that such bourgeois values — monogamy, hard work, etc. — are the best guarantors of success and happiness.

...

The gay experiment with open bohemianism was arguably shorter. Of course, AIDS played an obvious and tragic role in focusing attention on the downside of promiscuity. But even so, the sweeping embrace of bourgeois lifestyles by the gay community has been stunning.

Nowhere is this more evident — and perhaps exaggerated — than in popular culture. Watch ABC’s Modern Family. The sitcom is supposed to be “subversive” in part because it features a gay couple with an adopted daughter from Asia. And you can see why both liberal proponents and conservative opponents of gay marriage see it that way. But imagine you hate the institution of marriage and then watch Modern Family’s hardworking bourgeois gay couple through those eyes. What’s being subverted? Traditional marriage, or some bohemian identity-politics fantasy of homosexuality?

...

Personally, I have always felt that gay marriage was an inevitability, for good or ill (most likely both). I do not think that the arguments against gay marriage are all grounded in bigotry, and I find some of the arguments persuasive. But I also find it cruel and absurd to tell gays that living the free-love lifestyle is abominable while at the same time telling them that their committed relationships are illegitimate too.

Many of my conservative friends — who oppose both civil unions and gay marriage and object to rampant promiscuity — often act as if there’s some grand alternative lifestyle for gays. But there isn’t. And given that open homosexuality is simply a fact of life, the rise of the HoBos — the homosexual bourgeoisie — strikes me as good news.

Communism's victims

2010-12-16T17:07:00.006-05:00

The New York Times has published an article by Frank Dikotter, professor at the University of Hong Kong, on the carnage visited on the people of China by Mao Zedong's "Great Leap Forward":

The worst catastrophe in China’s history, and one of the worst anywhere, was the Great Famine of 1958 to 1962, and to this day the ruling Communist Party has not fully acknowledged the degree to which it was a direct result of the forcible herding of villagers into communes under the “Great Leap Forward” that Mao Zedong launched in 1958.

To this day, the party attempts to cover up the disaster, usually by blaming the weather. Yet detailed records of the horror exist in the party’s own national and local archives.

...

In all, the records I studied suggest that the Great Leap Forward was responsible for at least 45 million deaths.

Read the whole article for the excruciating details.

Glen Reynolds at Instapundit has an interesting roundup of responses to the NYT article. Reynolds comments:

Communists are as bad as Nazis, and their defenders and apologists are as bad as Nazis’ defenders, but far more common. When you meet them, show them no respect. They’re evil, stupid, and dishonest. They should not enjoy the consequences of their behavior.

Remember that next time you see some naive socialist demonstrator sporting a Mao t-shirt & throwing bricks through a Starbucks window.

UPDATE: For commenter Brian Busby - here are two pictures from last summer's riot at the G20 summit in Toronto, which I found after a quick Google search. You could have Googled it yourself, you know.

Letter from Toronto

2010-12-09T19:51:00.003-05:00

I live in a rural area with no public transit system. None. You can't even take a cab out here; we depend exclusively on our huge gas-guzzling pickup trucks and carbon-spewing SUVs to get around. So, it's been with some amusement that I've followed Toronto's new mayor Rob Ford's first few days in office. I'm especially amused by the crib death of the city's elaborate and expensive Transit City project which aims to put dedicated streetcar lanes on major thoroughfares like Sheppard and Eglinton. I wondered why the citizens of Canada's World Class City were so attached to streetcars over the more proletarian buses that the rest of the province rides every day. I thought I'd better ask someone who lives in downtown Toronto and who doesn't own a car to explain it to me. So, I fired of an email to my friend and fellow blogger EMG, who writes at Edward Michael George. Here's our correspondence:

Dear EMG:

You live near the St Clair streetcar line that buggered up the entire neighbourhood for years and ran millions of dollars over budget. Was it worth it?

Can you explain to me what the big friggin' deal is about streetcars in Toronto? Transit City proposes to tear up major traffic arteries like Sheppard & Eglinton, disrupt commerce and traffic for God knows how long to replace two lanes of cars with expensive dedicated streetcar lines. Is this an improvement over regular buses that share the street with cars? Surely it can't be cheaper to build all these Transit City "LRT" routes than to just put more buses on the streets?

Is riding a regular bus such a hellish experience for the poor straphangers, and conversely is a streetcar such a quantum leap in cost, efficiency and comfort? I just don't get it. Why can't you urban elites just take the bus?

Can you explain this mystery to us poor hicks out in the country?

Eric

EMG replied:

Dear Poor Hick Out in the Country,

I don't normally condescend to speak to the turnip 'n' dirt people--in your case I'll make the exception. Buses simply aren't good enough for us. Buses are for you and all the other thick-fingered, dirty-eared, cannon-fodder types of your village. A place where, I suspect, everyone is related (and not distantly) to one another; a place that I'm vaguely familiar with as once I drove through it on my way to a fashionable vineyard and spa run by the most delightful homosexual couple (recently wed).

Don't streetcars remind you of metropolitan San Francisco? (Think Rice-A-Roni if this isn't ringing any bells for you ... Oh! Ringing any bells! A kind of a pun!) That's the sort of place I want to live in. And subways? New York City, surely. Though I'll admit that I like to stir the pot a bit with my bien pensant chums by referring to it contrarian-ly as "the tube." Cheeky! LOL.

Perhaps you are wondering how we pay for it all? A special talent that separates us cosmopolites from you potato proles: we've discovered huge reservoirs of cash way up our shiny white butts. A seemingly endless supply. And there's any amount of other useful things up there too. This reply for instance.

At an imponderable distance,

An urban elitist

I responded:

Dear EMG:

I expected that it was one of those "we're a World Class City" issues. Toronto is a World Class City; World Class Cities have "light rail" transit; ergo Toronto must have streetcars. It's a Richard Florida creative class thing - the creative class likes streetcars, and if Toronto wants to attract the creative class, it must have streetcars. Ditto for Gay Pride parades, a favourite of the creative class, which also squeeze government subsidies out of the hicks. I expect that Dalton McGuinty will soon use the same argument to announce tax breaks for Toronto's fair-trade coffee shops, organic arugula-mongers and sustainable solar-powered yoga parlours.

Thanks for enlightening me.

Eric

There you have it, folks - Transit City explained. Go to it, Mayor Ford.

Does the Toronto Star have editors anymore?

2010-12-08T19:31:00.005-05:00

I was in a coffee shop today with nothing to read, so I absent-mindedly picked up a copy of today's Toronto Star that someone had left behind. It made me want to take a shower afterwards.

Case in point - the appalling Heather Mallick. How this woman has found a successful career as a writer defies explanation. She had two articles in today's Star - the first was an obituary of Elizabeth Edwards. We are treated to salacious details about her husband John, including this tidbit from his career as a trial lawyer:

“Help, my stomach hurts,” a five-year-old North Carolina girl named Valerie called out to her mother as she sat on a swimming pool drain cover that a company named Sta-Rite knew would be improperly installed. She was feeling her intestines being sucked out. John won lifetime care for that girl, and rightly so.

Good God, did we need to know that grotesque detail in an obituary of his wife? Of course no quality obituary of Ms Edwards would be complete without a graphic description of her husband's affair with Rielle Hunter while she was fighting breast cancer:

In 2004, he ran as vice-president on the John Kerry ticket (George W. Bush won), Elizabeth got the breast cancer that would kill her, John ran again in 2007 while sleeping with a crazy, rapacious woman named Lisa Druck, a.k.a. Rielle Hunter, who filmed him performing oral sex on her, and after she had her unfortunate baby he paid her off, for which he may go to jail. In the meantime, Elizabeth was herself excoriated along the lines of, “Elizabeth Edwards not as nice as thought.” It sounds like an Onion headline.

Yuck. Poor Elizabeth - she deserved better than this from Canada's biggest daily.

Later in the same issue, Mallick writes an opinion piece on Julian Assange & the Wikileaks scandal. The tortured sentences she composes are so long & full of gear-shifts that I lost track of what she was talking about by the time I arrived, exhausted, at the finish:

As WikiLeaks whistleblower Julian Assange is jailed in Britain on weirdly convenient rape charges and denied bail lest he flee the charges of WikiLeaking he does not in fact face though every government security service is gunning for it—lo, he hath made truthful information available unto citizens of the planet—the scum is rising.

Huh?

Here's another gem, which somehow works a reference to JFK's assassination & Lee Harvey Oswald's coffin into the discussion:

I speak as a person who has still not recovered from the Daily Mail last week publishing online huge clear detailed photos from the littered rough pine interior of Lee Harvey Oswald’s empty coffin. I stared at the small oblong space where the American Dream went to die—how ironic that the death cavity should be so shabby—and was overturned by sadness.

But I’m not out to shut down the paper for publishing it. I’m not Amazon, Visa, Mastercard or PayPal—which have targeted WikiLeaks out of venom or cowardice—or even an irate subscriber. It’s my job as a writer to look at the photos and my duty as an adult.

Americans don’t care. You can go to the former School Book Depository in Dallas, Texas, and take pretend aim at JFK’s head, you can rent a floor of the building for your wedding reception, it’s all clean fun to them.

All this is bad enough, but Mallick holds herself to a higher standard. She's the self-proclaimed living embodiment of journalistic standards:

I recently turned down an offer to appear on a TVO panel to talk about the trial of Col. Russell Williams because the producer, the person responsible for mapping out the show, told me she hadn’t read the stories in the Star. She found the plea hearing gross and the news reports too icky for her sensibilities. “As a journalist,” she felt she didn’t need to know. She actually emailed me that.

I was embarrassed for her and politely declined to appear, me and my nauseating newsgathering. Then I banged my head hard on my desk until the pain went away.

Bang away, Heather.

Rudolph vs Predator

2010-11-27T19:54:00.001-05:00

The holiday TV special I wish had really been made: Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer vs Predator:

Homophobia at the UN

2010-11-23T17:21:00.003-05:00

So, tell me again why not winning a seat on the UN Security Council was such an embarrassment to Canada? Jonathan Kay writes in today's National Post about the latest travesty from the General Assembly:

No one expects Saudi Arabia, Cuba and Liberia to start printing gay-marriage licences any time soon. But would it be too much to ask that these countries at least oppose the targeted murder of homosexuals?

As it does every few years, a committee of the United Nations General Assembly has been fashioning a resolution calling for states to prosecute the extra-judicial killings of people because of their race, nationality, ethnicity, religion, language or other identifying characteristics. In past years, sexual orientation has been part of this list. But thanks to an amendment supported by a group of African and Muslim nations -- which passed by a vote of 79-70 -- the reference to sexual orientation has been struck from this year's resolution. The effective message is that killing someone because they're gay isn't that bad.

...

Putting aside the disgust one feels at the manner by which the UN now has become a forum for organizing homophobes (to go along with the body's day-to-day role of promoting bigotry against Israel), the results serve up several lessons.

First, they show that a nation's attitude toward homosexuality can more or less be taken as a reliable proxy for the general health of its society. With few exceptions, the list of 70 pro-gay nations all are places where most of us would gladly work and visit, and perhaps even live; while the anti-gay nations tend toward corruption, dictatorship, rigidly patriarchal values and a lack of religious tolerance.

Second, they show that homophobia is not a "natural" form of bigotry, as some social conservatives suggest; rather, it survives in the modern age due to one of three very specific influences: totalitarian politics, retrograde religiosity and the primitive social superstitions that pervade very poor societies.

Third, they show up the fantastic ignorance and hypocrisy of radicalized gay-rights groups as Queers Against Israeli Apartheid -- which direct their hate at pro-gay Israel while ignoring the dozens of Muslim countries where gay bashing is common and, as these nations now effectively have informed us, officially tolerated. By the same token, Canadian labour groups such as the Canadian Union of Postal Workers might tell us why they are telling their members that "Cuba needs our support" (that's an actual quote from a CUPW "international solidarity bulletin") now that the Castro brothers have voted down a resolution against gay bashing.

"You can judge a society by how they treat their weakest members," Gandhi once said. In many parts of the world, that means the gay population. It's sad that the UN's assorted, overlapping dictatorships, Muslim states and banana republics aren't just flunking Gandhi's test -- they're actually flaunting their failure at the General Assembly.

Liberals: "obsessing on the ephemeral while missing the substantial"

2010-11-23T17:15:00.002-05:00

Joel Klotkin writes in Politico - How Liberalism self-destructed:

Democrats are still looking for explanations for their stunning rejection in the midterms — citing everything from voting rights violations and Middle America’s racist orientation to Americans’ inability to perceive the underlying genius of President Barack Obama’s economic policy.

What they have failed to consider is the albatross of contemporary liberalism.

Liberalism once embraced the mission of fostering upward mobility and a stronger economy. But liberalism’s appeal has diminished, particularly among middle-class voters, as it has become increasingly control-oriented and economically cumbersome.

Today, according to most recent polling, no more than one in five voters call themselves liberal.

This contrasts with the far broader support for the familiar form of liberalism forged from the 1930s to the 1990s. Democratic presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Bill Clinton focused largely on basic middle-class concerns — such as expanding economic opportunity, property ownership and growth.

Modern-day liberalism, however, is often ambivalent about expanding the economy — preferring a mix of redistribution with redirection along green lines. Its base of political shock troops, public-employee unions, appears only tangentially interested in the health of the overall economy.

...

Often eager to micromanage people’s lives, contemporary liberalism tends to obsess on the ephemeral while missing the substantial. Measures such as San Francisco’s recent ban on Happy Meals follow efforts to control the minutiae of daily life. This approach trivializes the serious things government should do to boost economic growth and opportunity.

Perhaps worst of all, the new liberals suffer from what British author Austin Williams has labeled a “poverty of ambition.” FDR offered a New Deal for the middle class, President Harry S. Truman offered a Fair Deal and President John F. Kennedy pushed us to reach the moon.

In contrast, contemporary liberals seem more concerned about controlling soda consumption and choo-chooing back to 19th-century urbanism. This poverty of ambition hurts Democrats outside the urban centers. For example, when I met with mayors from small, traditionally Democratic cities in Kentucky and asked what the stimulus had done for them, almost uniformly they said it accomplished little or nothing.

So much for the "anti-gay Tories" narrative

2010-11-21T09:12:00.005-05:00

I've been asked frequently how I can support a political party that "hates gays". In fact I was in a relationship once that ended because my partner couldn't stomach the fact that I was a member of the Conservative Party of Canada.

Warren Kinsella pushed that button in his blog last July (sorry, link no longer works):

I was sort of wondering how you can be gay and a Conservative supporter at the same time.

I mean, not only do they deny your very existence - they think cabinet ministers should be punished for appearing in any way supportive of you, or those like you.

It's your life and all that, but I was just wondering how you sleep at night.

As I've indicated before, if the Harper Cons don't want you, we do.

(I responded to that post here if you're interested.)

Labelling the CPC as "anti-gay" is a convenient but intellectually lazy way for liberals to demonize their opponents in an attempt to frighten off voters, but it just doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

So, let's see how liberals spin this story: Minister backs refugee status for gay Iranians:

OTTAWA – The cause of gay refugees who flee persecution in Iran only to face harassment in Turkey has caught the attention of the federal immigration minister, who says Canada is willing to facilitate their resettlement here.

Jason Kenney wrote the Canadian office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to urge quick processing of their applications after a story appeared last month in the Toronto Star.

That story centred on Iranian Arsham Parsi, now a Toronto-based advocate whose "Iranian Queer Railroad" project tries to help gay and lesbians in legal limbo in Turkey reach Canada or the United States.

"I can't imagine more legitimate grounds for protection than folks who are facing potential execution in Iran for their sexuality," Kenney said in an interview. "These are people who are clearly in need of protection, and Canada has already received a number of gay and lesbian Iranian refugee claimants through the UNHCR, typically through Turkey."

...

Kenney's letter to the UNHCR says "homosexual Iranians who have been granted asylum in Turkey are subjected to persecution (random beatings, harassment, etc.) in the country of asylum, and that homosexual Iranians are in a uniquely precarious position."

Kenney told the Star more gay and lesbian Iranians could be accepted here under current targets.

To paraphrase Kinsella, if Iran doesn't want you, we do.

To liberals, the people are stupid

2010-11-20T19:14:00.004-05:00

The shock and dismay from Toronto urban liberals at the election of Rob Ford as their mayor reveals yet again a revealing mindset they have when elections don't go their way: when conservatives are elected, it's because the voters are too stupid to understand what's best for them.

Kelly McParland nailed it on the day after the election with this column in the National Post: Crying into their frappucinos:

Across Toronto yesterday morning bleary-eyed residents grabbed their two-wheelers and cycled to Starbucks, ordered up a stiff frappuccino -- what the hell, make it 2% milk, I'll need it--and surveyed the damage.

It couldn't be true. Rob Ford, Mr. Double-Double, a guy who never met a cruller he didn't like, had pulled it off. The man got himself elected mayor. All those angry suburbanites, the ones who were supposed to complain a lot but skip the actual process of voting, had turned up en masse and put the guy in office.

For Toronto's urban sophisticates, it was a wipeout. Total repudiation. Worse than the time they ran out of well oaked chardonnay at Vintages. What are they supposed to do now, move to Calgary? Buy a leaf blower, for Chrissake? Any day now they'll be erecting barriers at Pusateri's, checking IDs. No one gets in without a credit card from Home Depot.

Ann Althouse ponders the same phenomenon on display after the midterm elections south of the border:

Bill Lueders's Isthmus article is subtitled "The Triumph of Stupidity." He asks UW-Madison political science professor Charles Franklin how people could vote the way they did, and when Franklin answers "They're pretty damn stupid," he says "Thank you, professor... That's the answer I was looking for."
Frankly, it's an answer embraced by many people I know. One of my Isthmus colleagues sent me a study showing that Dane County, which bucked the trends on Election Day, is by far the most educated county in the state. "When conservatives cut support for education," she mused, "they do so to keep people dumb and their own interests in power."
Welcome to my world: Dane County, Wisconsin, home of people who tell themselves they are the smart people and those who disagree with them must certainly be dumb. They don't go through the exercise of putting themselves in the place of someone who thinks differently from the way they do. But how would it feel to be intelligent, informed, and well-meaning and to think what conservatives think? Isn't that the right way for an intelligent, informed, and well-meaning person to understand other people? If you short circuit that process and go right to the assumption that people who don't agree with you are stupid, how do you maintain the belief that you are, in fact, intelligent, informed, and well-meaning?

What is liberal about this attitude toward other people? You wallow in self-love, and what is it you love yourself for? For wanting to shower benefits on people... that you have nothing but contempt for.

The real story behind GM's stock offering

2010-11-18T17:47:00.004-05:00

Nick Gillespie at Reason cuts through the fawning media coverage of GM's multi-billion dollar stock IPO:

We've been down this road before:

Hey, didn't you hear that the GM bailout is working out just swell! Why, we're likely to make us a profit on the bailout, so let's not dawdle over details, such as whether the whole goddamn thing was even legal in the first place (because it wasn't!).

The first time we heard this happy-happy line was when then CEO Ed Whitacre took to the airwaves to lie about GM's payback of its TARP loans "in full and ahead of schedule." (See below for why that argument had about as much credibility as a Chevy Citation's cooling system).

Now GM has done its first stock IPO and everything is on track for a happy ending. Right? Right! Right?

GM sold about 478 million shares Wednesday at $33 each, a price higher than the company and its bankers thought was possible just days ago. An additional 71.7 million shares are expected to be sold by GM's bankers as part of an "overallotment" allowed when sales are stronger than expected. And it sold $4.35 billion in preferred shares.

So come on, tell us, how'd we (and by we, I mean the taxpayer/owners) do? The good news is that the sale will reduce the government's ownership stake from about 61 percent to 26 percent. The bad news?:

With Wednesday's sale, including the overallotment, the Treasury lost roughly $4.5 billion on GM shares it acquired at an effective cost of $43.84 apiece. The Treasury would need to reap $26.4 billion, or an average of $52.79 a share, on its remaining stake to break even.

...

But the important thing to remember is: The IPO proves the GM bailout wasn't just good politics, but good business. Got it?

All those questions about the rule of law, whether it's a good idea for the government to bail out a company that lost records amount of dough the very year it sold the most cars ever, whether the domestic-owned auto industry is locking in amber workers and resources that could be productively used elsewhere, or even whether the feds coulda made more money parking that $50 billion in a Bank of Iceland Christmas Club account -well, just forget 'em.

There's nothing to see here, just poor-performing tales that will continue to roll off the media assembly line like so many 2010 Chevy Cobalts destined for scrap heaps.

"Liberty: it's an easier sell than you think"

2010-11-10T18:19:00.001-05:00

James Delingpole on being a libertarian:

Easily the most intelligent, articulate political commentary I hear these days comes from people who class themselves as libertarian. It’s the most joined-up political philosophy I’ve ever come across. It’s attractive on a personal, emotional level because it’s pro-human, pro-freedom, pro-the-little-man-against-the-big-bullying-state; and it’s attractive on an intellectual level because it’s based on empiricism, on what actually works as opposed to what ought to work, on how real people choose to live their lives rather than on how government can best implement its latest whacko new scheme to help imaginary people live their lives in a way some interfering wonk thinks might be better for them.