Barrel Strength

Looks like the End of Days is coming earlier than expected.

At least Jerry Lewis may finally be vindicated.

There are two articles of interest floating about the blogosphere this weekend and I want to bring them to your attention. First is the suppression of scientific evidence by the Environmental protection Agency. Second is the absolute swindle encompassed by cap and trade. The two are part of a vast conspiracy to loot the poor (everyone below a billion dollars of personal wealth) for the benefit of a few of the really rich. I wanted to say “left-wing” conspiracy but I am not sure that looting the treasury and social wealth on such a scale can be left wing or right wing; it transcends such ideas.

First: create the hysteria for which your legislation is the solution. Carbon dioxide, the natural process of all combustion, is named as a pollutant, despite its fundamental role as the life-giver to lamnts.

Second: create a market which appears to reduce CO2 emissions while actually filling the pockets of the very very rich with the revenues from carbon-dixide licences (caps) which are “traded”. How do you do this? Reduce the amnunt of caps by law.

First: bad science

 You will have read about this elsewhere in an article by Declan McCullough, about the suppressed report on carbon dioxide. The report says, in its executive summary, about the science of global warming:

•  that the US is acting principally on the IPCC report of three years ago;

that, since that time, and in contrast to what the IPCC predicted:

• global temperatures have been in decline while CO2 emissions have increased;
• Atlantic hurricanes are not increasing in severity
• Greenland ice is not diminishing
• the recession has greatly reduced greenhouse gas emissions below IPCC estimates
• that solar data (how much the earth is warmed by the sun) was downplayed in the IPCC report, contrary to evidence.

You can read the rest of the report for yourselves. Evidence ignored. Evidence suppressed. Bad science driving out good science. Read the rest…

There was discussion at the office the other day concerning the traditional formula for the distribution of federal money.

Earlier in the process we had automatically allocated one third for French-language companies and two-thirds for English language companies.

Why, you ask, is the “traditional”, accepted, automatic division when the population division is roughly one quarter French-speaking and three quarters English-speaking?

Several reasons are used. First, the language divisions are not as clear-cut as you might think. Second, some rough-justice allocations started in the 1970s and have continued ever since unchanged, guarded by the French-Canadian members of the government.

The 2006 census reports the following division of the country by mother tongues:

English                                        57.2%

French                                         21.8%

Both E&F                                      0.3%

Other                                            19.7%

English and Other                      0.8%

French and Other                      0.1%

http://www12.statcan.ca/census-recensement/2006/dp-pd/hlt/97-555/T401-eng.cfm?Lang=E&T=401&GH=4&SC=1&S=99&O=A

So the question becomes: Is there a fair way to divide the nearly 20% of Canadians who have neither French nor English as their mother tongue, for the purposes of allocating federal money to only two language groups?

You can play with the stats in many different ways. For instance, you can divide the other category proportionately to the presence of English and French in the total population. Thus you take 57.2% of 19.7% allophone figure for the English language share, and 21.8% of 19.7% figure for the French language share.

Alternatively you can find statistics for who speaks English at home and who speaks French at home and divide the allophone figures according to those two numbers.

Taking figures from the 2001 census ( a little old but all I could find), we find:

“The proportion of the population that spoke English most often at home, 67.5%, was appreciably higher than the proportion whose mother tongue was English (59.1%). This was due to the attraction of English for members of other language groups. Even in Quebec, where anglophones represent a minority, the same situation prevails.

“Only 10.5% of the population spoke a non-official language most often at home, far lower than the 18.0% who reported a non-official language as mother tongue. These individuals adopted one or the other official language as home language. Generally speaking, the longer immigrants stay in Canada, the more likely they are to speak English or French at home.”

I did the figures both ways: calculating English spoken at home and by dividing the allophone figures by the proportions of English and French mother-tonguers. Either way it comes out to a bit over 67% of the population which speaks English regularly.

Accordingly a rough 70-30 division of federal spending between the two language groups is fair, if  you accept that proportion of the population speaking English or French is the appropriate basis of division. On the other hand, if you think that French gets two thirds because of their special needs or special status, you will not be pleased.

The SCOTUS Scores site provides an intriguing statistical depiction of the ideological shifts in the court from 1937 to 2007, employing the Martin-Quinn Scores methodology.

H/T Slashdot.org

http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2009/2009-329.htm

This is an important decision. Consider the alternative, that the CRTC would licence speakers, authors, writers, photographers, downloaders, musicians or bloggers, or “exempt” them from broadcast licencing, on condition, of course, of being good or paying a tax. It is rare that government turns down an opportunity to regulate.

Of note is the concurring opinion of Commissioner Denton, who rips into the Broadcasting Act with a vengeance.

Where is the blogosphere on this? Asleep?

This is perhaps the most unwittingly damning self-confession of liberal relativism I have encountered:

It’s about attempting to understand people who are radically different from you, and saying to them you want their voice in the process. Tolerance isn’t just a value you hold, so much as it’s something you do repeatedly. It’s uncomfortable. You fuck up. You go to parties where they play music that you don’t know how to dance to. You go to restaurants where the food is difference. You go to neighborhoods, where no one speaks English. The whole time people on the outside are laughing at you. The people you’re trying to understand get pissed at you, and call you racist, homophobe, bigot, sexist etc.

But they ultimately respect you for trying. And you get better. You pick up bits of a second language. You learn to like the food, to enjoy the music. And then one day you look up, and lo and behold, it seems like the whole world is dancing to that same music, eating that same food.

Because, of course, the end-game of multiculti tolerance is one nation united in its devotion to funky restaurants, the world music programming on Radio Two, endless afternoons of hacky-sack and blissful amnesia about the real world around you.

The chap on the phone wanted to know if I would support the Conservative Party.  I said I would support the Conservative Party when the Conservative Party supported free speech.  My parting words were a request that he pass the message along, but I doubt he did.  I could have mentioned the need for a review of immigration policy, and the truly insane over-spending but he caught me a little unprepared, and free speech was about all he had time for anyway.

The One’s new tone of accommodation towards the Islamic world isn’t playing in Peshawar, much less Peoria:

A message attributed to the deputy leader of al-Qaeda has denounced Barack Obama as a “criminal” on the eve of the US president’s Middle East trip. Ayman al-Zawahiri said Mr Obama’s “bloody messages” would not be concealed by “polished words”

[...]

He called Mr Obama “that criminal who came seeking, with deception, to obtain what he failed to achieve on the ground after the mujahideen ruined the project of the Crusader America in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia”.

[...]

[Obama] will travel to Egypt on Thursday, where he will make a speech at Cairo University. In the audience will be 10 senior figures from the banned Islamist group the Muslim Brotherhood, the BBC’s Christian Fraser reports from Cairo.

And the Muslim Brotherhood is equally charmed by the prospect of that visit.

So is the Salafist troglodyte community.

A very interesting analysis of the public finances of the United States compared to those of Canada. Upsets all stereotypes. Courtesy of the Brussels Journal.
The author reviews the data and concludes:

“The current Canadian government is a ‘conservative’ one, but its hold on power is tenuous because it is also a ‘minority’ government (in Parliament). It has little to do with the positive trends outlined above, since it came only to power fairly recently. That means that the credit for these positive trends goes largely to the center-left governments that have governed Canada for much of the past two decades and who have implemented major fiscal and some structural economic reforms that have made these numbers possible. And there are also indications that the Canadian banking system is in much better shape then the American one. Meanwhile, in the USA, many Republicans have been profligate with the public purse in recent years, and much of the political left marches today in the opposite direction from the one taken by recent Canadian center-left governments. And Obama-mania on the part of the mainstream media is not going to make matters better…before the next election cycle.”

Madame Justice Sotomayor in a speech in 2001:

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

The New York Times reviews this here.

Frank James in NPR’s news blog has this to say about it.

I quote from James’ article, which refers to Stuart Taylor’s attack on this line of thinking:

“Her statement has prompted charges that she traffics in identity politics. How could it not? Stuart Taylor of the National Journal wrote a widely read criticism of her speech. An excerpt:

“Indeed, unless Sotomayor believes that Latina women also make better judges than Latino men, and also better than African-American men and women, her basic proposition seems to be that white males (with some exceptions, she noted) are inferior to all other groups in the qualities that make for a good jurist.
Any prominent white male would be instantly and properly banished from polite society as a racist and a sexist for making an analogous claim of ethnic and gender superiority or inferiority.

“Imagine the reaction if someone had unearthed in 2005 a speech in which then-Judge Samuel Alito had asserted, for example: “I would hope that a white male with the richness of his traditional American values would reach a better conclusion than a Latina woman who hasn’t lived that life” — and had proceeded to speak of “inherent physiological or cultural differences.”

“I have been hoping that despite our deep divisions, President Obama would coax his party, and the country, to think of Americans more as united by allegiance to democratic ideals and the rule of law and less as competing ethnic and racial groups driven by grievances that are rooted more in our troubled history than in today’s reality.”

Lurking in the background is a case where Sotomayor dismissed an appeal from New Haven firefighters whose successful test results were dismissed by the New Haven fire department. The reason? The successful applicants for the supervisor jobs were disproportionately white. The City of New Haven, apparently fearing lawsuits from blacks over the “disparate impact” of objective testing, dismissed the tests. This is known as the Ricci case after Frank Ricci, the dyslexic firefighter who quit his seocnd job, obtained tutoring, and passed the supervisor test.

The case is now going before the US Supreme Court. Stuart Taylor explains the origins of the disparate impact issue:
“The Court’s response was to rule that any test with a “disparate impact” on blacks — meaning that disproportionate numbers had low scores — was presumed to be invalid unless required by “business necessity.” Lack of intent to discriminate was no defense to such a disparate-impact suit. This remains the law today, although the Court and Congress (in 1991) have tinkered with the detailed rules.

“Over the decades since 1971, fewer and fewer employers have engaged in intentional racial discrimination against blacks or Hispanics. Likewise, the objective tests used by employers — including the New Haven fire department’s written and oral promotional exams — have been more and more carefully designed to be valid measures of job-related skills.

“Two things have remained constant, however. First, blacks and, to a lesser extent, Hispanics, score markedly lower on average than whites and Asians on objective tests of job-related skills — whether for firefighter, police officer, manufacturing worker, or other blue-collar jobs.

“This is what one might expect in a nation still plagued by vastly unequal educational opportunities and academic performance. Studies show, for example, that on average, the math and reading levels of black 17-year-olds are no higher than those of whites and Asians in the eighth grade. And the gap is not closing.”

Stuart Taylor’s article is essential reading for understanding what I expect will be a growing resistance by white people (of all races and colours) against the racial spoils system so dear to the Democrats.

  Read the rest…

An economic pioneer from Chicago? Yes.

Milton Friedman? Not quite…

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I have been reading a truly interesting book, 1491, by Charles Mann. It deals with the catastrophic impact of European diseases on the Indians of the Americas. It deals with the epidemioligical facts of life and death, covering some of the same ground as Jared Diamond’s Guns Germs and Steel, Hans Zinsser’s Rats Lice and History, and William McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples.

1491 recounts the growing consensus that the population of the Americas was reduced by 95% in the centuries after contacts with whites by smallpox, measles, influenza, and other diseases to which Europeans, Africans, and Asians had developed greater resistance. A “virgin” population was destroyed several times over before whites even arrived on the scene.

The same was said by Francis Parkman in the 19th century. He said that European settlement advanced into the de-populated regions of North America, which he thought, mistakenly, consisted of a band about several hundred miles in advance of white settlements, where white desieases had ravaged the aboriginal population. His error, apparently, was in considering that anyplace in the Americas at all had escaped these catastrophic ravages. Bernal Diaz, a junior officer in Cortes’ invasion force, recounts how the Aztecs were dying like flies in the siege of Tenochtitlan, the great capital of the Aztec Empire, in 1521. Other Spanish accounts confirm the dreadful effects of disease and plague on the Amerindian population.

1491 gets into trouble from the opponents of political correctness, who think that the idea that North and South America were densely populated before the advent of white men is so much PC nonsense, and from another school which likes to think the Indians went “light on the ground”, interfering with nature as little as possible, living in harmonious balance with Gaia.

Neither view is true, according to the latest research. This consensus may be no more valid than the consensus on anthropogenc global warming. For several reasons, 1491 can be read with pleasure by a broad readership, in confidence that they are not being seriously misled. First, billions of government funding for research are not at stake. Second, because all historians and all contemporary observers of the European Conquest of the Americas are at one in remarking upon the immediate effects of smallpox and other diseases on the Indians; only the size of the original population is at issue. Third, because, as the book itself relates, the Indians have left massive evidence of their systematic working of the earth in many places in both Americas.

An entertaining and informative book such as this deserves a wide readership. You will learn a lot, painlessly.

I asked my friend the Dark Lord about the difference between the British National Party (BNP) and the UK Independence Party. He replied as follows:
———–
The UKIP is a one-issue party, anti-EU to be sure, but probably founded by Establishment insiders as a means to allow the Great Unwashed to blow off steam harmlessly. Then, when all the fuss dies down, it’s back to business as normal.

“Appeals to the educated”… Arf, arf.

That’s the presumptuous piffle of the eternally soft. Oh! If only we could talk in university coffee club language, with occasional references to thinkers we might have read in our studies, and have the masses swing behind us, wouldn’t it be wonderful?

Yes, it would, but it isn’t going to happen. The real issues in Britain are not the level of state economy or free enterprise, much as we would like them to be, but the collapse of the education system, the settlement of the nation by hordes from the Dark Ages, the corruption of the police force, the destruction of the legal system, and the denigration of all national traditions. And all this aside from the corruption in government that even the BNP could not have dreamed up.

The British National Party is talking to ordinary people. It is ordinary people. They are now John and Jane Normal. That’s why the Establishment is worried.

Every thing else is light beer.

And the UKIP is light beer–a waste of effort.

A recent article in Gates of Vienna makes the point that the vast increase of German social spending under Hitler was based on the expropriation, and subsequent enslavement of Germany’s Jews.

The same point is made in Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler. The German state was running a huge deficit that could only be made up by pillaging its Jewish citizens. Robbery on a massive scale was an essential part of the national-socialist program.

“There was nothing irrational about the Holocaust. It was the only way Hitler could finance his social security. And that very same social security was the reason that the Germans got carried away with him, despite the hardships of war. They gained: the companies and houses of Jews were available for “nothing”. Jewish household goods and clothing went to those who lost their homes in the bombings. Money, jewels, and gold went to the state.”

It is no surprise to those who are politically literate that national-socialism is a leftist phenomenon, but it needs repeating.

I experienced tremendous emotional resistance, when arguing these facts, from those who believe that fascism is a right-wing phenomenon. It is not. Read Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism.

_____________

Pensee d’escalier: Mr. Jonah Goldberg points out that the entire anti-semitic project of Hitler was madly irrational. I grant  this freely. But rationality, when considered instrumentally, is the coherence of methods in relation to one’s ends. So from that weaselly point of view, robbery of those whom you wish to destroy is “rational”. In the same way that heart sacrificies are “rational” if the Sun God will fail to shine unless fed with the hearts of enemies.

My hero Theodore Dalrymple has pointed out the relentless campaign of British authorities to reduce the capacity of people to defend themselves.

I am not talking about firearms.  Lack of access to legal firearms reduces your ability to defend yourself, true.

But their real aim is to destroy any assurance that society will back you up if you aggressively defend yourself.

Two recent cases in Canada are disturbing. Brian Knight, an Alberta rancher was charged with excessive force for chasing the thief who stole his all-terrain vehicle and driving him into a ditch.

Then in Toronto the Good, David Chen, a Chinese grocer was arrested and charged with forcible confinement for chasing down a thief, beating him and throwing him into the van to bring him back to the scene of the crime.Police also charged Mr. Chen and his employees with assault, kidnapping and carrying a concealed weapon.

The report from the National Post said the following:
“The suspect ran down the alley, throwing his bike behind him. Mr. Chen leapt over the bike in pursuit.

“After they caught up to the suspect and put him in the van, they drove the van to the side of the road because it had been left in the middle of the street, he said.

“Mr. Chen said he then called police, but a citizen had already alerted officers who stopped the van.

“Mr. Chen and his employees were handcuffed and taken to the police station. He was carrying a box cutter in the cellphone case clipped to his belt, which accounts for the weapons charge.

“He said he had recently complained to an officer about his store being plagued by shoplifters. His employees caught two suspected thieves on Friday. Employees guarded one suspect inside the store for almost six hours until officers arrived, he said.”

Mr. Chen was charged with unlawful confinement because the police took six hours to show up! His concealed weapon was a box cutter, which is a tool legitimately used to open boxes – he is in the grocery business.

Today the following details emerge from a Globe and Mail report:

“After catching him, Mr. Chen said he and his employees tied the man up and put him in a delivery truck, intending to hold him until police arrived. But someone else called 911 first.

“The first thing we told police this guy he stole a thing from my store there,” Mr. Chen said. “But the police [officer] didn’t hear anything. He just pulled me down on the ground, put me in a car and sent me to the station.”

“Mr. Chen said he spent 24 hours in a holding cell at 52 Division, paid $7,500 bail, and that the suspected shoplifter – also charged – got out of custody before he did.

“He and his two employees, Jie Chen, 21, and Qing Li, 40, were each charged with carrying a concealed weapon, which the shopkeeper said were grocer’s box-cutters, like the one hanging from his belt loop.”

This is the advice we receive from our cops:

“Superintendant Ferguson said that according to the law, people trying to make a citizen’s arrest have the right to use physical force to detain someone only if they have witnessed a crime. Unlike a police officer, they are not allowed to arrest someone if they merely suspect the person of committing a crime previously.

General police advice, he said, is that citizens should not confront or try to catch criminals on their own.”

Leave to us professionsals, who show up six hours late.

 What is the point of these noisy front-page arrests? To intimidate people into not taking action to protect themselves. Why would police and authorities want to do this? What is their interest? My speculation is that they have lost their moral compass; they fear an aroused citizenry. They envy the directness of citizen action. They wish they could do the same themselves. They cannot. And if they can’t, no one can. Only specialists such as themselves are capable of maintaining order. If people took it into their heads to maintain order, the general uselessness of the police would be more effectively demonstrated. It is the same in education. No one can learn except by being taught by a unionized public school teacher.

It reminds me of Adam Smith’s talk of merchants never getting together but to conspire against the public interest. Only in this case it is the public authorities who seek to enforce their legal monopolies.