Barrel Strength

Hotel staff everywhere should stand in awe of their colleagues at the Taj Mahal Palace in Mumbai, who were so imbued with the concept that their primary duty was to look after guests that many risked their lives to lead guests to safety when the terrorists attacked last Wednesday. Tales of heroism are beginning to emerge that amaze – including one maintenance man who stepped between a terrorist taking aim and some guests, and may have paid with his life (his condition is not yet publicly known).

Contrast these instances of courage under fire with the abject cowardice and dereliction of duty of Mumbai police officers at the city’s Chhatrapati Shivaji station, where one local reporter observed them hiding in fear and refusing to return fire or even attempt to secure the station and prevent any more trains from entering a shooting gallery, “There were armed policemen hiding all around the station but none of them did anything,” he said. “At one point, I ran up to them and told them to use their weapons. I said, ‘Shoot them, they’re sitting ducks!’ but they just didn’t shoot back.” He added, “I wish I’d had a gun not a camera.”

Did these men understand anything about what is expected from someone who puts on a police uniform? Or did they attend the same quality of training academy as their colleagues in New Orleans – where as many as 500 of the 1,600 officers are thought to have fled in advance of Hurricane Katrina , leaving the citizens they were sworn to protect more vulnerable to looters, muggers and murderers in the devastation and chaos that followed?

… only criminals will be safe from bears.

My hero, Theodore Dalrymple, constantly maintains that England is becoming an unliveable hell populated by degenerate savages assisted by a welfare bureaucracy that absolves people of moral responsibility. He places the blame squarely on the ideology of the middle class leftists. In another blog posting, I shall make an extended comparison of Orwell:Dalrymple::Marxism:Political Correctness.

Meanwhile, check this out:

Mr Frank Field, MP(?) was speaking at a university:

He said: “The 1950s were the peak years for Britain being a peaceful and self-governing kingdom. We only have to look at the levels of crime, particularly violent crime, to register just how dramatic a change has occurred.”

There were now more violent crimes recorded by the police in the past 12 months than between 1900 and 1977, he said.

More people were beaten up or stabbed in his Birkenhead constituency than in the whole of the country a century ago.

The root cause of these ills was “the growing collapse in the art of good parenting”, he said.”

This is a jewel of a speech, which rests the issue on the belief in central planning versus the belief in freedom. I reproduce it here because it deserves the broadest possible readership. He gave it in March 2008 at a conference in New York City on climate change.

From Climate Alarmism to Climate Realism

Written By: Václav Klaus (pronounced Vaslav to us non-Cyrillic readers)
Published In: News Releases > March 2008
Publication date: 03/09/2008
Publisher: The Heartland Institute

Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen,
I would like first of all to thank the organizers of this important conference for making it possible and also for inviting one politically incorrect politician from Central Europe to come and speak here. This meeting will undoubtedly make a significant contribution to the moving away from the irrational climate alarmism to the much needed climate realism.

Read the rest…

There is a widespread belief that we are living in a more enlightened age than the nineteenth century. Then, the white, the male, and the Christian were thought to be superior, according to the modern interpretation of what they thought in the 19th century. Obviously they thought wrongly in the 19th century. Today, we hold ourselves so much more enlightened, because we believe the white, the male, and the Christian are inferior. Bad. Evil in fact – not that we feel comfortable with so judgmental a word as “evil”. But whiteness is the new blackness, according to the politically correct.

Take for instance the case of the students’ council of Carleton University of Ottawa. It has removed the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Association from the list of charitable organizations it will support with its efforts. Why?

According to them, cystic fibrosis is disproportionately a white male disease. Accordingly, it is not an appropriate concern.

“OTTAWA — The Carleton University Students’ Association has voted to drop a cystic fibrosis charity as the beneficiary of its annual Shinearama fundraiser, supporting a motion that argued the disease is not “inclusive” enough.
Cystic fibrosis “has been recently revealed to only affect white people, and primarily men” said the motion read Monday night to student councillors, who voted almost unanimously in favour of it.”

Is breast cancer inclusive enough? Is sickle cell anemia inclusive enough? Is prostate cancer inclusive enough?

The Carleton Students’ Council is set to reconsider the motion.

Racial, sexual, and religious hierarchies are not eliminated by inverting them.

A factual note

By googling incidence of cystic fibrosis, the following appears quickly.

“In the United States, the incidence of cystic fibrosis is highest in Whites of northern European ancestry (1 in 2,000 live births) and lowest in Blacks (1 in 17,000 live births), Native Americans, and people of Asian ancestry. The disease occurs equally in both sexes.”

Another entry reports that:

“We develop a statistical model for estimating cystic fibrosis (CF) incidence among infants born in the U.S.A. that accounts for under-diagnosis due to death prior to diagnosis and we apply it to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation Patient Registry data for the years 1989 to 1991. The resulting estimate of incidence relative to live births among whites is 1:3419 while that among non-whites is 1:12,163. As a by-product of the modelling approach, estimates of the underlying average diagnosis age given survival to diagnosis are 409 years for whites and 455 years for non-whites, but this difference was not statistically significant and appears to demonstrate that diagnosis efforts may be approximately the same for whites and non-whites.”

As a final note, perhaps student council debates might be improved by access to the Internet.

WSJ updates us on this noble cause in Europe.

On Sept. 3, the European Court of Justice ruled that the Security Council resolution was invalid. The duty to comply with the U.N. Charter, it declared, “cannot have the effect of prejudicing [regional] constitutional principles.” In doing so, the ECJ followed its advocate general’s argument that “international law can permeate [the European Community] legal order only under the conditions set by the constitutional principles of the Community.”

A case of European exceptionalism perhaps?

Dear Dr. Runte:

Congratulations on your appointment to Carleton University. I wish you every success.

That said, I would request that Carleton University remove me from every database, mailing and telephone list that might allow the school to get in contact with me.  Any communication that does reach me will not be answered, acknowledged or read. In light of the students’ association decision that Carleton no longer cares about me, I no longer care about Carleton.

Best regards,

Friday’s edition of NYT published an interesting article on slow blogging and your correspondent read it in a characteristic slow fashion, hence the delayed post.  It notes the following:

A Slow Blog Manifesto, written in 2006 by Todd Sieling, a technology consultant from Vancouver, British Columbia, laid out the movement’s tenets. “Slow Blogging is a rejection of immediacy,” he wrote. “It is an affirmation that not all things worth reading are written quickly.”

The Slow Blog is of course manifestation of a wider phenomenon of “slow movement” and “slow life“.  Your correspondent will post his thoughts on this topic in due course.

Chris Matthews, MSNBC’s resident buffoon, who felt a “thrill going up my leg” when he heard BHO giving a speech and vowed that his job is to make BHO’s presidency a success, proposes an immediate takeover of the presidency to help the current economic condition (Is power vacum killing the ecnonomy?).  He doesn’t clarify where these extra-consitutional powers will be derived from.  Perhaps the precedence was this in 1933.

…. is Canadian reality.

An article in the Mail Online states that British police cannot be members of the British National Party.

Merseyside Police said: ‘We understand that the British National Party names a Steve Bettley for an alleged association with the party.
‘Whether Merseyside PC Steve Bettley was, or is, a member of BNP is subject to an ongoing inquiry.
‘Chief Constable Bernard Hogan-Howe has reiterated our position that membership of the British National Party is totally incompatible with the duties and values of Merseyside Police.

‘We will not accept a police officer or police staff being a member of BNP.’
Officers are banned from joining or promoting the BNP because it would damage race relations, according to the Association of Chief Police Officers.

Since 2004, officers have faced dismissal for being a member of the BNP because of the risk it could damage race relations.

I googled “BNP membership eligibility for police”. The first article that came up was a notice from the South Wales police, as follows:
Membership of the BNP or similar organisation
“The police service has a policy of prohibiting any of their officers or staff from becoming members of the BNP or similar organisation whose aims objectives or pronouncements may contradict the duty to promote race equality. If you are, or have been a member of the BNP or similar your application may be rejected.”

An advertisement for the London Metropolitan Police states:

“Your Character

“All employees of the Met, whether they wear a uniform or not, are in a position of responsibility and trust. As such they should be law-abiding citizens with proven integrity. If you have previously been convicted of a criminal offence or had involvement with the police your suitability will be subject to careful consideration.

We also have a policy of prohibiting any of our officers, staff and volunteers from becoming members of the BNP or similar organisations whose aims or pronouncements may contradict the duty to promote race equality.”

An advertisement for the Thames Valley Police says the same.

The BNP’s policy page states its policy on immiga=ration as follows:

“On current demographic trends, we, the native British people, will be an ethnic minority in our own country within sixty years. To ensure that this does not happen, and that the British people retain their homeland and identity, we call for an immediate halt to all further immigration, the immediate deportation of criminal and illegal immigrants, and the introduction of a system of voluntary resettlement whereby those immigrants who are legally here will be afforded the opportunity to return to their lands of ethnic origin assisted by a generous financial incentives both for individuals and for the countries in question. We will abolish the ‘positive discrimination’ schemes that have made white Britons second-class citizens. We will also clamp down on the flood of ‘asylum seekers’, all of whom are either bogus or can find refuge much nearer their home countries.”

As they say, this is for your information.

Somalians after humbling the US in 1993, have expanded their display of force to include seizure of a Saudi Arabian oil tanker and an Iranian grain ship.  This provides a very easy way for BHO to score points.  Somali pirates are no match for the US navy and do not enjoy political support.  A move by BHO against them will allow him to easily display how “tough” he is with no downside.  The fact that US can act unilaterally on the high seas, without any repercussions, will enhance his war-monger quotient, without making him look silly like Dukakis in a tank.  Look for this to be high on his agenda in January, unless of course Bush takes away this easy layup.

Yes He can save us!

Peter Hitchens, the Christian and conservative brother of the propagandist of atheism, had these doleful thoughts on the election of Obama. He was in Washington DC, at the time, crossing from the white area into the Spanish and black zones.

“As I walked, I crossed another of Washington’s secret frontiers. There had been a few white people blowing car horns and shouting, as the result became clear. But among the Mexicans, Salvadorans and the other Third World nationalities, there was something like ecstasy.

“They grasped the real significance of this moment. They knew it meant that America had finally switched sides in a global cultural war. Forget the Cold War, or even the Iraq War. The United States, having for the most part a deeply conservative people, had until now just about stood out against many of the mistakes which have ruined so much of the rest of the world.

“Suspicious of welfare addiction, feeble justice and high taxes, totally committed to preserving its own national sovereignty, unabashedly Christian in a world part secular and part Muslim, suspicious of the Great Global Warming panic, it was unique.

“These strengths had been fading for some time, mainly due to poorly controlled mass immigration and to the march of political correctness. They had also been weakened by the failure of America’s conservative party – the Republicans – to fight on the cultural and moral fronts.

“They preferred to posture on the world stage. Scared of confronting Left-wing teachers and sexual revolutionaries at home, they could order soldiers to be brave on their behalf in far-off deserts. And now the US, like Britain before it, has begun the long slow descent into the Third World. How sad. Where now is our last best hope on Earth?”

I wish I could say with complete assurance that this was not so, that Peter Hitchens is entirely mistaken. Yet I cannot agree that this truly describes the situation. Power shifts from party to party in transitions that are felt to be momentous at the time. Obama’s election may may mark such a decades-long shift to the Democrats. On the other hand he may be the Hoover and not the Franklin Rooselvelt.

Obama has inherited a mess. But the European banking system is in far deeper difficulties. The US banking system fell under the malign influence of a ratio of bad debt to GDP of 6%. I have heard tales that many European countries have ratios of bad debt to GDP of 30, 40 and even 80%. If this be true, and I see no reason to doubt my informant, then terrible times are in store for the enxt several years as these delayed fuze bombs explode, and governments react with inflationary measures.

As to confronting left wing professors, it is difficult to see how it could be done without a thought-control commission and explicitly politcal firings, which, however welcome, might just as well threaten conservatives. (Vide Ezra Levant’s struggles with the Alberta Human Rights Commission). And sexual revolutionaries are not worth shutting down political liberties for either. Liberal society – one governed by rational discourse – will survive Obama as it has survived Bush.

“It’s early days and he (Obama) hasn’t collected his thoughts on South Asia,” said Ambassador E. Ashley Wills, who served in India and Sri Lanka.  That pretty well sums up the Obama foreign policy foray into the South Asian swampland known as Kashmir where, according to several newspaper reports, he is considering appointing Bill Clinton as a special envoy to help negotiate a settlement between India and Pakistan over this region.  News of this has been greeted with delight by Pakistanis and separatist in Kashmir, which should be the first warning sign that he is getting off on the wrong foot.

Bush did an excellent job in restoring relations with India, after years of pro-Soviet tilt, by overruling single issue bureaucrats in the State Dept and by agreeing to the nuclear pact between the two countries.  Given the importance of a counterweight to Pakistan and China in that region, it is quite amazing that that Obama has chosen to meddle in a region that has resisted solution since 1947.

News reports today suggest that BHO is considering naming Hillary Clinton as his secretary of state.  Your correspondent is of the opinion that this is a leak by Bill Clinton, who wants to ensure that Hillary isn’t around much, so that he can test Dalwhinnie’s theories with a similar sample size.