Barrel Strength

Soon, the face of liberalism in America will have a new name. Whether it is Barack or Hillary, the result would be the same if they were to win the Presidency. The opponents of American culture would push the throttle, devising new justifications for judges to depart from the constitution. Economic neophytes would layer heavier and heavier burdens on employers and families, slowing our economy and opening the way for foreign competition to further erode our lead.Even though we face an uphill fight, I know that many in this room are fully behind my campaign.” You are with me all the way to the convention. Fight on, just like Ronald Reagan did in 1976. But there is an important difference from 1976: today… we are a nation at war.

And Barack and Hillary have made their intentions clear regarding Iraq and the war on terror. They would retreat and declare defeat. And the consequence of that would be devastating.

The Rev. Dr. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury steps up his campaign for Dhimmi of the Year:

He stressed that “nobody in their right mind would want to see in this country the kind of inhumanity that’s sometimes been associated with the practice of the law in some Islamic states; the extreme punishments, the attitudes to women as well”.

But Dr Williams said an approach to law which simply said “there’s one law for everybody and that’s all there is to be said, and anything else that commands your loyalty or allegiance is completely irrelevant in the processes of the courts - I think that’s a bit of a danger”.

“Sometimes associated” in “some Islamic states”? Who, indeed, will rid us of this meddlesome priest?!

The Canadian province of Quebec, like most of the Western world, now relies on immigration to ensure that there are enough working bodies to provide Jean and Claude with a comfortable inflation-adjusted pension. The paucity of the French empire limits this option with bulk of the immigrants coming from Haiti.

Read the rest…

A propos yesterday’s entry about Confrederate telecom policy, Senator Obama has pledged himself to network neutrality. My definition of network neutrality consists of the ability of an Internet user a) to reach all end points on the Internet and b) at a price which bears no regard to the economic value supposed to exist in the transaction so enabled (you do not pay more to reach Google or Amazon than you do to reach Barrelstrength).

People keep trying to say this issue is dead and buried. It is not.

 See Andrew Odlyzko for some pertinent articles on this issue. Network neutrality is the current formulation of an age-old issue of how much can carriers discriminate among traffic by uses and users. It goes back to ferries, canals and railroads. Having lasted so long, it is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.

Is it just me or does one get the feeling that we are once again in the mid 1970s in US? In the financial markets the prices of various commodities, such as grains, gold and oil, are hitting multi-year highs as they were back then. On the political front things are similar as well.

Read the rest…

IN 1860, when the Confederate States of America established themselves, a constitution was passed that had several interesting features. “Congress was forbidden to pass a protective tariff or to appropriate money for internal improvements.” So wrote Shelby Foote in his magnificent “the Civil War: A Narrative” (at page 42). Now what could that mean, no appropriations for internal improvements? The pressing need was to settle the West. Railroads needed incentives to build out their infrastructure, as we would call it today. In the North, the withdrawal of the Southern Democrats, the then conservative party, freed the northern Yankee improvers to grant land to railways, endow colleges with state land, and to pass the Homestead Act, which gave 150 acres in freehold to any man or woman who settled and farmed a piece of land in the western states for three years. All these statutes were first passed in the years 1860-1865 when the South seceded. The Southern bottleneck that opposed the passage of progressive legislation voluntarily withdrew.

The Republicans were then the party of the North, of New England and its western colonies, such as Kansas, Ohio, Michigan and Minnesota. They were the progressive party. They were the ones pushing the slaveholding states into secession, by electing that Republican radical abolitionist (so the South thought), Abraham Lincoln. The colours of the parties were then appropriate to the traditional connotations of red and blue. Democrats - blue -conservative: Republicans - red - liberals. More than people care to recall these days, the US Civil War was a battle between progressive Republican New Englanders against conservative Southern Democrats. Can we agree that people who believe in the right to own slaves are conservative of an extreme interpretation of private property?

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In today’s NY Times, Fouad Ajami, one of the leading critics of Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order” and its preceding essay in Foreign Affairs, throws in the towel:

Nearly 15 years on, Huntington’s thesis about a civilizational clash seems more compelling to me than the critique I provided at that time. In recent years, for example, the edifice of Kemalism has come under assault, and Turkey has now elected an Islamist to the presidency in open defiance of the military-bureaucratic elite. There has come that “redefinition” that Huntington prophesied. To be sure, the verdict may not be quite as straightforward as he foresaw. The Islamists have prevailed, but their desired destination, or so they tell us, is still Brussels: in that European shelter, the Islamists shrewdly hope they can find protection against the power of the military.

“I’ll teach you differences,” Kent says to Lear’s servant. And Huntington had the integrity and the foresight to see the falseness of a borderless world, a world without differences. (He is one of two great intellectual figures who peered into the heart of things and were not taken in by globalism’s conceit, Bernard Lewis being the other.)

As Homer Simpson observed sagely, there’s the wrong way and the Max Power way, which is the same as the wrong way but faster.

The refutation of this was posted earlier. Why the hell would we grant the protections of the Charter to foreign pirates and brigands while state institutions are stealthily withdrawing them from Canadian citizens?

O tempes, o mores!

The current leftie line on the Ezra Levant/Mark Steyn versus Human Rights Commissions and the power of Islam controversy goes roughly as follows. 

1. Right wingers support limitations on the right of Human Rights Commissions to suppress speech.
2. Right wingers are evil people, as we all know. (Conservative liberals  in the style of George Jonas must be conflated with national socialists to make this desperate analogy work).
3. Therefore the attempt by Keith Martin, MP, to rein in the Canadian Human Rights Commission is itself unwarranted and possibly evil.

Nothing in Joan Bryden’s piece (linked above) spoke of  the suppression of free speech,  for the sake of Islam.

Nothing about the establishment of religion in a secular state.

Nothing about the unfairness that gives the HRCs every procedural, evidentiary, and cost-imposing advantage.

Nothing about the proper role, if any, of Human Rights Commissions in a liberal democratic society. Just: “Some racialists support Keith Martin.” I quote:

“Victoria MP Keith Martin was praised Friday on stormfront.org, a website that proudly displays the logo “White pride world wide” and links to radio addresses by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.

“Martin earned the dubious distinction after giving notice that he plans to introduce a private member’s motion calling on the government to repeal Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.

“The controversial section prohibits electronic communication of anything deemed “likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt.” It is at the heart of investigations by human rights tribunals into complaints against former Western Standard publisher Ezra Levant and Maclean’s magazine for publishing material some Muslim groups found offensive.

“The cases of Levant and Maclean’s writer Mark Steyn have sparked much furious debate, nowhere more so than among right-wing bloggers.”

 It reminds me of the time I was debating capital punishment with a then  NDP Member of Parliament, Simon de Jong (a very decent chap and wrong about a huge number of things).

1. They hang people in South Africa.
2. We oppose apartheid in South Africa.
3. Therefore capital punishment is morally wrong. 

 Are the Left really that stupid? Do they think we ought to believe them? Do they believe this stuff themselves?

Joan, I know you have to write stuff for a living every day, but you have got yourself on the wrong side of this transcendently important issue. The Human Rights Commission issue is not about striking the right cocktail party attitudes, it is about your right not wear a hijab and also to express rude thoughts, in private and public, about right wingers (you can fill in the blank for the appropriate group whose thoughts, feelings and attitudes you wish to disparage), without living in fear.

As the replicant Combat Team Leader, Roy Batty, said at the end of Blade Runner:

Now you know what it’s like to be a slave: always living in fear.

I do not want to live that way, and the right wingers’ fight against HRCs, as you label it,  Joan, is yours too.

“I am big. It’s the ideas that got small.”

Are you certain you would actually consume a German-manufactured cheeseburger in a can¹?

¹ May contain traces of Schrödinger’s cat. Or maybe not. Or possibly maybe/maybe not.