Barrel Strength

So this is the Canadian Islamic Congress’ ‘reasonable’ proposal to end their crypto-legal challenge against Maclean’s?!

Their chutzpah knows no boundaries. The only reply must be an unwavering demand for total unconditional surrender: dropping of all HRC complaints, full payment of legal costs and an apology for tortuous behaviour.

Was this what the writers of Law and Order: SVU had in mind when they came up with tonight’s episode, in which a self-righteous bespectacled man poses as a police officer on the telephone to trick people into committing crimes?

You might well think that: I could not possibly comment further.

UPDATE: It’s back! Click and enjoy!

[youtube RHPX10xzlMc]

Alas! The IP Lawyers probably saw that the long excerpt from a German version of Hitler’s last days in the bunker offended “fair use”. That is the most charitable interpretation I can give. The subtitles in English had nothing to do with the bunker, of course. They were a completely accurate rendition of the facts in the Warman-Jadewarr-Barabara Hall-CHRC imbroglios. Anyone with the source of this parodic film, please let me know ehere it can be found. It is too precious to be lost.

Melts in your own keeper’s box, not in your hands.

Lots to be savoured in pubs in London’s West End and other fine Blue establishments elsewhere through to next Wednesday.

Can it be that the absence from Canada of Stephen Harper has led the government into a public opinion debacle akin to the collapse of a Third World regime when the caudillo lingers too long at some international summit?

We have the response to Elections Canada’s singularly peculiar and aggressive tactics on the “in-and-out” tempest handled by walking forty-watt bulbs in the personae of Ryan Sparrow and Pierre Poilievre, one orchestrating a media clusterfuck unparalleled in memory and the other having his arse handed to him by a normally sympathetic radio host.

I know Stephen Harper to be both shrewd and profound. But we are at a point where the conventions of tribal loyalty and gut instinct must be balanced against the looming reality of a fruitless battlefield. Harper must get full rein on the situation: a clear defensible line of argument must be set down and heads must roll — period. Nothing less will regain the confidence of the Canadian electorate.

Get it done, Prime Minister!

In her recent interview, Lessing admits that Communism, to which she was once attracted, is rubbish.

“Communists, she now believes, are ‘murderers with a clear conscience’. But it took her a long time to get there. ‘Yes I called Marxism “the sweetest dream” in one of my books. Then I discovered it was all a load of old socks. It seems incredible now that quite intelligent people believed in it all. What doubts there were were expressed in sly jokes. The jokes contradicted everything we believed in. We used to joke about how we were wrong about everything.”

They were wrong about everything, and the mystery is how they simultaneously knew it and pretended to be the vanguard of the omniscient.

Lessing wrote some interesting science fiction, a field not often taken up by lefties, possibly because its premises usually suppose technological progress, t which they seem opposed in fact if not always in principle.

The story takes place on the planet Shikasta (Earth) tens of thousands of years in the past. The all-wise Canopians have the humans in their tutelage, living is stone igloos in ordered ranks under the indirect rule of the UN-type Canopian colonial bureaucrats. The story is written from the point of view of a would-be colonial bureaucrat from the Sirian system, who envies the Canopians their superior moral and social development. Then disaster strikes. The Puttiorian Empire, under the direction of the Criminal Planet Shammat, disrupts the massive phase array (the Lock) that keeps the minds of the humans in thrall. Liberated from the all-wise mental domination of the Canopians, the humans fall into history: they achieve freedom.

It is not pictured that way by Lessing of course. The terrible Puttiorians and the ambassadors from the Criminal Planet Shammat leer at girls’ breasts, wear leather shoes, and smirk knowingly. The more I contemplated the eternal smug dullness of the Canopian rule, the more I thought it resembled a benign North Korea, and the more evident it was that the Criminal Planet Shammat was governed by me, George Jonas and Mark Steyn. Ridding Shikasta of Canopian-Sirian Con-Dominium was the obligation of every free thinking moral person. Come to think of it, it still is.

“With her latest book she has come full circle to the Rhodesia of her childhood. There is a moving chapter in which she describes returning as an elderly woman to the country she had once loved, only to find it devastated by years of Mugabe’s tyrannous rule. She encounters a drunk and obnoxious black man who won’t let her see her father’s old farm. She had been a great champion of black rule.”

Ah! To live long enough to see all the errors of our ways. You can take girl out of the Party, and eventually you can take the Party out of the girl.

The search for a Third Way to address the failures of socialism and perceived inequity of capitalism is a constant phenomenon. Despite the failure of this policy in Far East during the 1990s, where it was implemented by a honest, educated and intelligent civil service, the philosophy is once again advocated by the book Nudged.

The reviews describe this book as “gem of a book”, “utterly brilliant book”, “book is terrific” and so on and so forth. The book advocates “Libertarian Paternalism” or “Soft Paternalism”. This philosophy believes the state can “help you make the choices you would make for yourself—if only you had the strength of will and the sharpness of mind.” Ah yes, the sharpness of mind. Before one signs up an Obama-wannabe, complete with an attitude and sidekick with a chip on her shoulder, for advice let us see how the state has done historically.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then this one is better than a thousand socialist slogans. Sovereign default seems to be a constant theme through the history. It seems all those who want to watch and hover over us, themselves need watching.

Notes for a eulogy, Monday April 21st, 2008, Smiths Falls, Ontario

Doug never needed one of these [a script] because Doug was always himself. He never pretended to be anything he wasn’t, and you always knew where you stood with him. In a very real sense, what he said was what he thought. What you saw was what you got. I’ll tell you what I saw 36 years when I arrived in Germany to work with Doug at the Forces radio station in Lahr. I saw a hippie. He had a full beard, hair down to his shoulders, and a leather cowboy hat. He even had a Volkswagen van. It was a pleasant surprise to learn that Doug the hippie was also Doug, the very serious professional broadcaster. He taught all of us a lot.

Doug was the best coach the Ottawa Senators never had. He would have made a great general manager too. When the phone rang after a particularly rough period of hockey, I always knew it was Douglas, but I never knew what he was going to say. It was always interesting and insightful. He knew the game of hockey. We weren’t happy about this season at all.

Doug was always after me to take up golf, and I always resisted. He was very patient with me, and he probably thought that if he waited long enough, it would happen. Well, at least one of us waited a little too long. I think it was me. I know I would have enjoyed it. I know I would have had lots and lots of free advice.

The only time he ever got a little boring was when I wanted to talk about my children because that was when he wanted to talk about his children. Karina and Harry, I know a lot more about you two than you think I do. He thought the world of you two. He loved you for your struggles and for your successes. We can all be happy that he saw both of you doing so well.

Things were going great for Doug lately and they were only going to get better. His enthusiasm for political causes and his broadcasting skill were starting to come together on the Internet. The interviews he did on his Web site, The Right Side, were beginning to attract a lot of attention. He was making a big contribution to a growing community. When I looked at some comments about him last week, I wasn’t surprised to see how sad and unhappy people were but I was surprised to see just how many there were and how much they counted on him to point the way. Doug came right out and said what a lot people think. He was a great source of information and inspiration to a lot of people. Just the archive of interviews he left us will be important in the years ahead.

Doug was a great friend to me. You never had to be on your guard with him. You could be yourself. He made people feel comfortable because he was sensitive and gentle and kind. Janice, nobody knows that better than you. I know that he looked to you for so much and he always got more. The two of you were complete and you will never be apart.

I think it was William Shirer in ‘Rise and Fall of the Third Reich’ who talked with a German who compared Adolf Hitler to the stock figure of the Heiratsschwindler, a confidence man who cheats widows and spinsters out of their little means with the promise of marriage. Like the marriage swindler, Hitler achieved his end by promising what he never intended and taking what could never be recovered. To me, the Heiratsschwindler is the human rights commissioner who swears to the truth of a glowing future against a guaranteed investment today. All will be well if you but surrender the right to think and speak and read and write. Within the marriage swindle, the crisis comes when the victim must assign all her assets to the custody of the mustachioed villain. At the first sign of resistance, the Heiratsschwindler gathers himself into a ball of principled and outraged fury to explode upon his victim. “How can you dare to doubt my integrity and my intentions? I give you the promise of love and assured financial security, based on the soundness of the investment scheme for which I need all your savings, more or less immediately and without conditions and certainly without troublesome questions which visibly upset me and delay our bliss.” Trust, indeed love, is the basis of the swindle but the closer is emotional blackmail of the basest kind. If you are not already acquainted with the sinister plans of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, I would urge you to study them without delay. This is the confidence trickster writ large.

Two people I have known died this week, both without warning. One, Doug Aldridge, I have known from Reform days. He had come to Ottawa for a medical appointment, where he had been informed that he was free of cancer. I spoke to him last Firday on the phone. We reminisced and discussed the freedom of speech and the Human Rights Commissions/Levant/Steyn issues. He drove out to see his daughter west of Ottawa on the weekend and was killed in a three-vehicle smash-up on Highway 7 coming back. Bang.

Of Elizabeth deWolfe I know less. She was alive last week and dead this week. She was the sister-in-law of a friend of mine, taught school, did good work, was an admirable person. Both Doug and Elizabeth might have been expected to live for decades more, were they not at the wrong end of the bell curve of mortality.

“Death brings clarity to other judgments”. Thus spoke my friend the Dark Lord as we considered these events. No matter what your problems with your job, your boss, your clients, your wife, your kids, the prospect of death puts them all in the right perspective. “Let death be your adviser” said Don Juan Matus in one of the Cataneda books. “Imagine it sitting on your shoulder, and seek its counsel”, he said. I was in my twenties at the time and felt immortal, but I still recall it. Now I think I understand what the old sorcerer meant.

Calculate the number of weeks you expect to live, as an exercise. If I die between 75 and 85 years of age- may I be so lucky – I will have between a thousand and a thousand six hundred hundred weeks to live. That is a comprehensible number, though it is not as large as one might imagine. My days are numbered. So are yours. Enjoy them. It is all you get in this body, even if you believe we are recycled through other bodies periodically. And if we are not so recycled, it is even more poignant.

The lamps are going out all over the world:

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Barrelstrength announces the creation of a movement to assist the smaller defendants in the Warman case. We are calling it Tankards for Truth.

 The idea is that people across Canada will hold events in their favourite drinking spot to raise money.

Board games, movies, sports events, bicycle rallies, 100 meter marathons for out-of-shape bloggers - it does not matter. Help organize a fundraiser in your community.

No money should go to Tankards for Truth. All money you collect should be sent to the defendants.

Our goal is to raise money for Catherine MacMillan of Small Dead Animals, Mark and Constance Fournier of Free Dominion, Ezra Levant, and Kathy Shaidle of Five Feet of Fury. We assume that the Aspers and the National Post can take care of themselves.

We know that each of these bloggers has a donations button on their pages. We  intend to supplement their fund raising with fundraising on their behalf.

We will communicate with the defendants to tell them of our support and coordinate our efforts with theirs, as appropriate.

We will set up a website, www.tankardsfortruth.ca, which will be up shortly. A MySpace page will be created. We will allow postings of events and cooperate with other activists to help defray the costs of supporting freedom of speech.

We welcome all communication from supporters of the bloggers who have been made the subject of Richarrd Warman’s libel suit. 

Let every person concerned with freedom of speech in this country know of this movement. Organize your own Tankards for Truth event.

Let us know how you feel. Write to tankardsfortruth@gmail.com or Dalwhinnie@barrelstrength.com. Get out there and drink, run, play, bicycle, perform for freedom of speech! get every friend you know to your local event. Send the defendants money!

We will have more details as we develop our plans.

The Commission’s statement on the Maclean’s case was wicked, cowardly, hypocritical and I do not think it would be mischaracterized by the word evil. It passes belief that you took more than a moment to realize the case had no validity. It is completely wrong that you then condemned Maclean’s for precisely the transgression you declined to investigate. Beyond that, I am horrified that you seek to expand the powers you already abuse so shamelessly. You look to tyrannize over thought by force. You recklessly encourage illiberal and dangerous forces. To quote Edmund Burke, “But this weapon will snap short, unfaithful to the hand that employs it.” When you legitimize the suppression of lawful expression of opinion, which is precisely what you have done and intended to do, you endanger everyone.  In the foolish pursuit of some abstract ideal, you have done a real and immediate wrong.

How far has the regime of fear penetrated? Very far indeed. Take this example. How difficult has it become to have a rational discussion about government policy touching on visible minorities the civil service?

According to my informants, it has become impossible.

The federal public service has a plan to hire a lot of visible minorities to the federal public service, about one in five according to an announcement in 2000.

Read the rest…

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has formally complained to China’s ambassador to Canada about the continued blocking of the broadcaster’s websites in China. 

The CBC prostituted itself to China last November when it first delayed and then censored the Falun Gong documentary to suit the PRC’s embassy. What does the CBC, and by implication the government of Canada now expect? The corporation sold itself and is only now discovering that prices in that marketplace always go down, never up.