Barrel Strength

Blog postings like this only confirm my growing suspicion that the shade of difference between many self-proclaimed conservative “activists” and social “activists” is that the former will claim a predilection for a Tim’s double-double over the latter’s allegiance to the fair trade decaf soy latté. And that is because the supposed champions of the right have as their mirror image the typical “pinko shit disturber” when it comes to bleating, “But that’s not fair!”

Case in point: the accusations against Stephen Harper that he is not moving sufficiently to the right in the current parliamentary environment. He has to govern within a minority Parliament. Simply put, he leads a party that does not enjoy the essentially automatic confidence of the House that comes with a majority of seats in hand.

I realize this smacks of remedial civics but see how so many in the blogosphere wilfully deny this fact. Suppose Harper introduces a bill to privatize the CBC. Not only would it be assured of defeat but it would certainly be deemed a matter of confidence and so result in an election. Between the vituperation of an institution under attack like the Mother Corpse and its familiars in the mainstream media, just try to see if the proposition of a Conservative victory would survive our version of the Clapham Omnibus test.

In retrospect it is now easy to see how the coalition debacle of 2008 flowed from the suggestion to phase out political party subsidies. Of course on paper it makes eminent sense and many Canadians would find merit in it. But how deluded must one be to imagine that the opposition parties would willingly commit seppuku for the benefit of the governing party?! Yes, the opposition acted out of craven self-interest: what else would you expect them to do?!

The reality of the current parliament is irksome for most, yet for some it is so profound an obstacle to the realization of their wishes that they ignore at the minimum, at the extreme denouncing it as unfair to their dreams. The difference between this and the mindset of the spoiled idle children who hit the streets for sundry causes like anti-globalization or denunciation of Israel is frankly asymptotic.

The activists love to berate those who toil in the trenches of conventional political warfare, in riding associations and on the electoral hustings. They thrill to the brazen pronouncements of solidarity with the true conservative cause on their web pages. The crowds at think-tank conferences content themselves with the smug satisfaction of those who are unstained by the base toil of genuine political work, it being the preserve of insular-minded hacks on the Hill.

And that is why such people are rendering all forms of assistance short of genuine help to the task of establishing a majority conservative government in Ottawa.

What do you do when you have just filled in the crossword puzzle? You toss it away with complete lack of interest, right? Up to that moment, you have been obsessed with every letter. Up to that moment, you have been spending hours, over the course of days perhaps, decoding. Then poof! A sudden change of value is made in your mind. I draw this to your attention because I am obsessed with attention, and how it shifts, and what happens when it does.

Once I removed an old piece of equipment from a circuit board in my house. The heavy piece of electrical equipment had been functioning perfectly all its life, since the 1920s probably. The next moment it was scrap. Who declared it scrap? I did. Another mental event. Useful one moment, scrap the next. 

Global warming of the man-caused variety. When did it move from “useful”or “true” to “scrap” or “false” in your mind?

But this is only one of any number of changes, decisions, evaluations we make in life.  Some of them are far more significant for our self-perception and social status. Grew up Protestant, become a Jew. Grow up Jewish, become a Unitarian. Grow up Unitarian, become a Roman Catholic. Grow up atheist and find yourself thinking a whole lot about Jesus and what He accomplished. Always thought you were gay, marry a woman and live happily. Always thought you were straight, move to Sante Fe with Allan and open a boutique. Eat meat, dyke and, behold! you do, and marry the rancher who tends to the cattle, move to southern Alberta and join the Presbyterians.

Most of our changes are far less dramatic in nature, I grant you, and occur at a slower pace than dropping the old circuit breaker into the garbage.  Most of them, in my case, have involved ceasing to concern oneself with issues that used to fascinate me. Most of them have involved retreating from publicly relevant associations, such as political parties and church, into my own private pleasures and concerns. As I am not the first to have done so, I assume it is a feature of ageing. Many go in the opposite direction.

But the topic  here is evaluation: the mysterious process that says this one, not that one. Which brings me around to us, you and me. Who does the deciding? You and I. So in effect, and in reality, you and I are the source of the value. We make the decisions. We make the evaluations. We say: “this, not that”. So how on earth did we ever get the idea that value comes from somewhere outside of us? We are the value. We are value. Not God, not earth, not Gaia, not dad, not neighbours, nor the wife. Us. You and I.

So value is not extrinsic to us. It is us. It is we who judge a thing or a person by its or their fitness to a purpose, and we judge the purpose.  We are not just making valuations, we are the source of the value by which things and people are evaluated.

Maybe this is just this morning’s approach to the saying that the Kingdom of Heaven is within you. It is amazing sometimes to consider what happens when you decide to throw away the crossword puzzle.

Geert Wilders, the Dutch anti-Islamic politician,  address the British House of Lords today. Here is his speech. Please read it.

Unleash your inner geek, Prime Minister!

O QanaDa, juHqo’maj je vav saq.
Batlh je rewbe’, qod Hoch roghvaH ra’.
tiDu’ wew Hot’bey, legh HoS je tlhab.
Da ‘u’, O QanaDa, pe’av Hochlogh.

joH’a’ jegh juHqo’ yay je tlhab.
O QanaDa, pe’av Hochlogh.
O QanaDa, pe’av Hochlogh.

And the translation:

O Canada, our home world and fatherland,
Honour and love in all its people command.
Our hearts glowing, we see strength and freedom.
Throughout the universe, O Canada, we will stand guard for all time.

God give our home world victory and freedom.
O Canada, we will stand guard for all time,
O Canada, we will stand guard for all time.

The German government tells Greece to sell off some of its islands to pay its debts.

Al Gore wrote an op-ed in the New York Times this past weekend, in the same tone as Geoffrey Sachs’ latest in the Guardian. Nothing is wrong with the AGW craze, some little mistakes were made, the scientific consensus is overwhelming, floods, droughts, snowfall, species extinctions, alarums, dismay, send money. You know the drill. Former chief nerd at the Hadley CRU Phil Jones admits there has been no appreciable warming for past 15 years, but Gore’s buddies over at NASA find we have lived through the hottest decade since records have been kept. Oh and thnks to Gavin Schmidt and all the unindicted co-consprators over at NASA who have based their findings on reducing weather stations to low-lying and more urban locations.

Gore’s lyrical hymn to his wisdom can be found here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/opinion/28gore.html?ref=opinion

Full of gnostic hyperbole:

“From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption.”

Is there no end to his megalomania? Apparently not.

Geert Wilders, the oppressed Dutch politician, under fire from the establishment for saying true things about Islam, has the momentum in forthcoming national elections.

See the article by Paul Belien in the Brussels Journal.

Will everyone please pay attention to the Wilders phenomenon? It is a huge issue, whether a leading national politician can be thrown in jail for saying that Islam is an enemy to civilization, and there is no defence possible under Dutch law? Except by taking over the government, that is.

Changing the lyrics to the national anthem? Surely this is a mind-fuck! But whose minds? I notice the Tory blogosphere is responding with the same tentative feeling I have: have they gone mad? Is the spirit of Sheila Copps guiding our Fearless Leader? It is rather as if Stephen Harper has expressed a taste for rubber bondage fantasies in Chatelaine magazine. So out of character!

Or is this a precursor to the restoration to acceptance of “The Maple Leaf Forever”?

We suspect everything except the government having an outburst of political correctness. Say it isn’t so, Stephen!

I think it is a distraction, but from what?

“A Labour minister says his party has been infiltrated by a fundamentalist Muslim group that wants to create an “Islamic social and political order” in Britain.”

Note: this is a Minister of the Crown, the Labour Minister for the Environment.

For more on this, read here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/labour/7333470/The-infiltration-of-Labour.html

I am NOT making this up!

Also, more interesting is the report of this by Hizb ut-Tahir, the Liberation Party.

In fact, spend some time on http://www.hizb.org.uk/hizb/

Everything said by Gates of Vienna and like minded anti-Islamic sites seems simply the recitation of facts. They mean to do us in.

UPDATE

“Dispatches” on Britain’s Channel 4 tackles the issue directly in its latest episode, examining how the Islamic Forum of Europe has been infiltrating municipal government in London and redirecting public monies to its jihadist front groups.

Put simply, the situation is as bad as you thought.

This story doesn’t need commentary.

A seven-month-old girl survived for three days alone with a bullet in her chest after being shot by her parents as part of a suicide pact over their fears about global warming…

Her parents said they feared the effects of global warming in a suicide note discovered by police.

Update: UK Daily Mail provided the following additional details.

Their son Francisco, two, died instantly after being hit in the back.

But their unnamed daughter cheated death after the bullet from her dad’s handgun missed her vital organs.

Paramedics rushed her to hospital covered in blood when police alerted by worried neighbours discovered the massacre three days later.

The youngster is recovering in hospital in the town of Goya in the northern Argentine province of Corrientes, where doctors say she is out of danger.

Guardian newspaper reports on Obama’s first medical examination since becoming president.  Whilst pointing to general good health, it recommends that he stop smoking and “moderation of alcohol intake”.  If the stress of work is leading to alcohol dependency then there is only one piece of advice for Obama – you ain’t seen nothing yet.

This is what Lyndon Johnson’s Day-timer looked like in January 1968.

January 17 – Lyndon B. Johnson calls for the non-conversion of the U.S. dollar.
January 21 – Vietnam War – Battle of Khe Sanh: One of the most publicized and controversial battles of the war begins, ending on April 8.
January 21 – A U.S. B-52 Stratofortress crashes in Greenland, discharging 4 nuclear bombs.
January 23 – North Korea seizes the USS Pueblo, claiming the ship violated its territorial waters while spying.
January 30 – Vietnam War: The Tet Offensive begins, as Viet Cong forces launch a series of surprise attacks across South Vietnam.

That is enough to make any man drink.

Obama’s first year consisted of others taking measure of the man.  Now things will get interesting.

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With Congress in school and Presidency in an on-the-job-training program US is in great hands indeed.

Update: Reason magazine notes that Waters has been a member of the House Committee on Financial Services since 1990!  Twenty years and she is still clueless.

The former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, holder of the prestigious title of Master of Bubble Administration (MBA), who was widely lauded as an Oracle in the 1990s and was honoured with a fawning cover story in the perpetually naive Time magazine, has finally met his legacy.  Hillary Rodham Clinton highlighted the US deficit as a security issue and shared the following comments regarding Greenspan.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday said “outrageous” advice from former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan helped create record U.S. budget deficits that put national security at risk…

“I served on the budget committee in the Senate, and I remember as vividly as if it were yesterday when we had a hearing in which Alan Greenspan came and justified increasing spending and cutting taxes, saying that we didn’t really need to pay down the debt — outrageous in my view,” she said…

Clinton’s swipe at Greenspan symbolized the way the former central bank chief’s reputation has fallen since he left the job in 2006.

First named to the office by President Ronald Reagan in 1987, Greenspan served throughout the presidency of Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton. He was regarded as economic oracle whose cryptic pronouncements were searched for inner meaning and regularly moved financial markets.

Now, he has become a handy whipping boy blamed for helping inflate a housing bubble that eventually burst, setting off a grave financial crisis and plunging the economy into the worst recession in decades.

Very conveniently Hillary, she of the ever shifting last name, did not include the Internet bubble in the list of Greenspan’s “accomplishments”, but then she wouldn’t want to further tarnish the legacy of her husband on whose watch this bubble was inflated and eventually deflated with tech stocks peaking in March 2000.  This was seven months before Bush Jr. was elected and by the time he was sworn in the tech stocks, as measured by NASDAQ index, had already fallen by more than 50%.

The health dog-and-pony show has been widely declared a draw and given that it required skills other than campaigning skills, the outcome is not a surprise.  On the election campaign front, Obama continues to rack up wins and those who cross his path continue to suffer.

In September 2009 NY Gov. Paterson rejected WH entreaties not to run for reelection.  Eventually he learned the hard way not to mess with Chicago political crowd.  Earlier this week NYT dug up dirt and revealed that Paterson and state police officials contacted the woman who had accused David Johnson, an aide to the governor, of attacking her last year.  It finally forced Paterson to announce today that he will not seek reelection.

Obama is still a winner – when he is in his element.

It appears that a prominent Tory politician, Maxime Bernier,  has made the mistake of telling truth in a public place:  caution should be exercised in relation to the global warming scare because the science is faulty. Whenever a politician tells the plain truth in public, and that truth has become subject to a politically correct untruth, which in this environment always trumps it, the act is called a “gaffe”. Hence the discomfiture with M. Bernier. Everyone knows he is right except the Liberals and the Canadian media.

A Liberal activist treats this as the wonderful wedge issue that will separate Tories from the Canadian mainstream. Robert Silver is an energy consultant seeking to develop clean energy for Ontario.

“As a Liberal I obviously think this is a wonderful idea. I have a funny feeling Stephen Harper will think otherwise. He may have a real internal problem on his hands and I would expect this wedge to be exploited mercilessly in the months to come.”

I think this is one of those situations where, once again, it is the Tories who are reading it better than the Liberals. With whom will this issue resonate?

A more substantial and worthwhile discussion ensues at Watt’s Up With That. A debate is taking place between Judith Curry and Willis Eschenbach on the question of trust in science, which is really what is at stake here. Eschenbach insists the issue is not one of communication: the issue is, as he reports tongue in cheek, 73.1% of peer reviewed papers are junk science. Communicating junk better is not the solution.