Barrel Strength

Oh my, how will the Church of Gaia handle this outbreak of potential heresy?

Mr Jones, a former director of the waste firm Biffa and now an adviser to environment ministers and the London Mayor, Boris Johnson, also dismissed kerbside recycling collections in many areas as “stupid” because they mixed together different materials, rendering them useless for recycling.

He suggested that much of the country’s waste should simply be burnt to generate electricity.

“It might be that the global warming impact of putting material through an incinerator five miles down the road is actually less than recycling it 3,000 miles away,” he said.

Read the rest…

The President’s half-brother is arrested for drug possession.

Ah, good times.

The wind was freshening after an evening rain shower, driving the humidity out of the air. The temperature dropped from a humid Canadian summer’s day to something like those blue-sky days when a north wind has cleared out the heat, leaving one with feelings that autumn cannot be far off. Arran Gold and I were smoking fine Dominican and Bahamian cigars at his handsome limestone schloss somewhere in the British Caribbean.

We were reveiewing many things: age, character, friends’ ups and downs, the economic crisis, Obama, as we sipped small snifters of MacAllan 12 year old. A typical conversation you might think, for men who have somehow made it. Because here we were, having living long enough, and well enough, to do this.

Arran Gold was speaking of the gap between judgment and intelligence. “Take Noam Chomsky for example”, said Arran Gold. “That guy is brilliant, has written important books, influences many, and yet I would not trust his judgment on where to buy an ice cream”.

Yes. The difference between judgment and intelligence is one of the most intriguing features of the world we live in. The closing line of the Te Deum is “O Lord in the have I trusted. Let me never be confounded”. It is the prayer of the mature, that they not be deceived about the true nature of the world, in full consciousness that one can be entirely wrong about hugely important things, like belief in God. I haqve always been drawn to those lines because they express perfectly that a life lived in faith in God – however we define that notion – may be no more than a gigantic misconception, and yet, at this stage, it will do better as a conception of life than any atheistic bleakness which has ever been on offer.

For a more pertinent example, take all those clever Jews who flocked to invest in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. You can see them being sucked in by the relentless appeal to their being intelligent, smart enough to be in on the inside track. The appeal to the inner circle is universal, as C.S. Lewis long ago pointed out, but the lack of judgment, the failure to smell a rat, was in this case the kind of really high level scam to which the intelligent are particularly susceptible. The Jewish community is conducting a serious self-review in the wake of Madoff, as well they should, because it was their psalmists, long ago, who probably penned the lines “let me never be confounded”. It is a prayer of the intelligent and the mature.

As we reviewed the course of our lives, Arran Gold and I felt a measure of self-satisfaction, and the at the same time the eternal vigilance against being self-deceived. It is a narrow blade upon which we all walk threough life. Yet trust and hope seem to be essential virtues in discerning the path. Too much mistrust, too much negativity, and you become the kind of person that others flee, no matter how wise your commentary. Somehow one must keep a level head, and maintain several conflicting ideas in one’s head at the same time, to end up drinking fine scotch and smoking great cigars, on the back side of life’s course.

Thank you, Lord.

First it was the Russians, and now it is North Koreas who are taking steps after taking measure of President Obama.  Russia dropped their plans to deploy missiles near the Polish border, after Obama negated the plans to deploy missile defence shield in Poland and the Czech Republic.  A press report states:

An unnamed official in the Russian military’s general staff said: “The implementation of these plans has been halted in connection with the fact that the new US administration is not rushing through plans to deploy” elements of its missile defence shield in eastern Europe, according to the Interfax news agency.

Vladimir Putin, the Russian Prime Minister, had warned that the US shield – which the Bush White House said was necessary to defend against potential attacks from the Middle East – would be interpreted by Moscow as a direct provocation.

Now North Korea is changing tack as well.

North Korea said it is scrapping all military and political agreements with South Korea, accusing the government in Seoul of pushing inter-Korean relations to “the brink of war.”

“All the agreed points concerning the issue of putting an end to the political and military confrontation between the north and south will be nullified,” the reunification committee in Pyongyang said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency today.

It is no secret that the press coverage for Obama is much more fawning than the one George W. Bush. What is interesting is the length to which the press is willing to go to present it in that manner.  Steven Den Beste on his blog, when not posting about females in impossibly tight dresses, provides the following examples of press worship:

How Obama set the tone for a new US revolution
Oprah (who?) says “The Light of the New Age is here!”
Celebs compare Obama to Jesus, Gandhi
Black first family ‘changes everything’

A recent Obama incident highlights this trend. NY Daily News reports how Obama mistook a window for a door and tried to walk through it.

It looks like President Obama hasn’t gotten acquainted to his White House surroundings. On the way back to the Oval Office Tuesday, the President approached a paned window, instead of the actual door — located a few feet to his right.

The report then goes on to draw parallels to George W. Bush.

Doors didn’t open automatically for Obama’s predecessor either. While making a hasty exit from a 2005 press conference in Beijing, former President George W. Bush tugged on the handles of a door, only to find it locked.

The comparison is absurd because Bush was in Beijing, not in his home, and tried to open a door, not a window, which happened to be locked.

And requires them each semester to submit an essay on “What I did with my stimulus budget”.

Er, that’s it.

Damian Penny states on his blog:

Gerry Nicholls writes that this budget “makes me yearn for the days when we had relatively fiscally conservative leaders, like Jean Chretien.” I wish I could argue with that.

Please allow your correspondent to make a feeble attempt to argue this.  There is an old saying in the financial markets: definition of a financial genius is a bull market.  When “fiscally conservative leaders” like Jean Chretien were balancing the budget and creating surpluses, the world economy was in a boom.  That is why governments worldwide, all of a sudden, became prudent economic managers.  Better to be lucky than good and never confuse a bull market with brains.

Here Comes Everybody
The Long Tail
Planet Google

The world we are currently experiencing is a consequence of technical arrangements which have transformed the nature of markets and drastically lowered the costs of social organization. Lower costs of sorting information on a massive scale have produced a transformation of several activities which characterized the twentieth century: mass markets, hits, the star system, and limited choice. The Long Tail explores the implications of the change from limited to unlimited shelf space. Here Comes Everybody describes the consequences and social implications of these dramatically lowered costs of organizing people for all forms of collective organization.

Of the three, Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations” dwells best on the social implications of the new technologies. His major argument is that what used to be enormously difficult and expensive, such as social organization, has been rendered trivially easy. People can self-identify, collaborate, organize, sign-up, cooperate, and disperse, the prime example being Facebook. The fact that some things that used to be extremely difficult are now easy has grave implications for the professions. Professions exist, he says, to solve a problem of scarce knowledge and limited technical capacity. He argues that printed news media, and the journalists who go with them, are in the process of being eliminated. We do not need the news “profession” any longer. A profession exists to solve a technical problem, in this case, the scarcity of airwaves or printing presses. With the arrival of ubiquitous publishing and picture taking capacities in the general population, the profession of journalism is being gutted, like monks being thrown out of monasteries when printing replaced hand-writing as the way to produce books. The decline of newspaper advertising powerfully combines with increased amateur news collection to reduce reliance on newspapers.

Read the rest…

BBC provides the excuse.

Officers from 76 councils sampled 494 kebabs to test their nutritional value, during the Local Authority Coordinators of Regulatory Services (Lacors) study….

Some 35% of labels listed a different meat species than that actually found in the kebab.

Six kebabs were found to include pork when it had not been declared as an ingredient. Two of the six were described as Halal – food or drink permitted for Muslims, which must not contain pork.

Mr Theobald said it was “totally unacceptable” that people with certain faiths were unknowingly eating meats that were against their beliefs.

h/t Ed Driscoll.  John Ridley of PBS opines.

Every president to hold office has espoused some version of Americanism; the truths that we hold self-evident, even when those truths are not always in evidence. But for all their grand rhetoric and mostly good deeds, none was able to seal the deal on the trifecta of equality, plurality and socioeconomic ascendancy. Obama has. Obama is the more perfect union. He is a house united. Obama is the New Generation and the hot light of a dawn that goes way beyond clever talk of morning in America.

Quite simply, quite plainly, just by virtue his being, Obama is America. The first true American to lead our nation.

Seth provides a needed reality check on Obama.

…there were more dissenting voters to his election than any US President in history (59,934,786) – and that’s just counting the major ticket dissenters, not the write in votes for third party candidates.

It’s also worth noting that the percentage of people who voted for Obama is 52.9% …. Obama’s margin of victory (9,522,111) is only the 6th largest of all time, despite having the largest US population in history. Nixon’s 1972 margin (17,995,488), Johnson’s 1964 margin (17,951,287), Reagan’s 1984 margin (16,678,120), Roosevelt’s 1936 margin (11,070,786), and Eisenhower’s 1956 margin of victory (9,551,152) were all greater (with smaller populations mind you) than Obama’s (FiveThirtyEight).

His voter percentage margin of victory (7.2%), is only the 13th best in history. Harding in 1920 (26.2%), Roosevelt in 1932 (17.7%), Hoover in 1928 (17.4%), Wilson in 1912 (14.4%), Van Buren in 1836 (14.2%), Jackson in 1828 (12.4%), Buchanan in 1856 (12.2%), Eisenhower in 1952 (10.9%), Lincoln in 1860 (10.3%), Reagan in 1980 (9.7%), Taft in 1908 (8.6%), and H.W. Bush in 1988 (7.8%) all had greater percentage margins of victory than Obama (FiveThirtyEight).

In terms of voter turnout, the 2008 election was the largest (132,580,096) in history, as it should be with the largest voting age population (VAP) in history (230,917,360) (George Mason University). However, the 2008 VAP turnout rate (the total number of voting age Americans divided by the total number of presidential votes) is only the 4th largest since 1960 (InfoPlease). The 1960, 64 and 68 elections all had higher VAP rates (InfoPlease). The 2008 voting-eligible rate (VEP), which excludes those who did not register to vote and those who are ineligible to vote (because of their criminal status), also falls short of the VEP rates of the 1960s (University of Oklahoma).

When comparing the increase in total voters, the 2008 election only brought in an additional 10,285,118 voters from 2004 (InfoPlease). By comparison, the 2004 election brought in 16,708,704 additional voters from 2000, and 2000 enjoyed 9,129,929 additional voters from 1996 (InfoPlease). The voting age population increased by 9,972,649 from 2004 to 2008, 15,441,931 from 2000 to 2004, and 9,304,000 from 1996 to 2000 (InfoPlease).

Jennifer Rubin notes a “graciousness deficit” in Obama’s presidency and your correspondent noted something similar earlier.  She states:

Why do this? President Obama is the one whom we were told has unlimited empathy, who can bring people with differing perspectives together without recrimination. He is not hobbled by the Bush-Clinton political wars which left both sides of the political aisle exhausted and in low repute. He, of all people, had the ability to start fresh and elevate the tone in Washington.

We are seeing, I think, the unlimited hubris of a candidate enjoying sky-high poll ratings and media adoration who believes he owes his opponents only civility, but not respect.

The “why” is easy to answer.  Recall the Persian proverb: the scorpion doesn’t sting out of malice, it is its nature to do so.  Similarly, Obama famously stated: “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.”  This after all is a president who learned his politics in Chicago, where they play with elbows up.

The amount of bad news associated with UK these days makes it difficult to find a starting point.  Iceland, Greece and Spain have lost their AAA credit rating and UK is pegged to be the next one to lose it.

The U.K. government may lose its top AAA credit rating after taking a 70 percent stake in RBS, credit-default swaps show. The cost of hedging against losses on British debt rose to a record today and is now the same as protecting against default by RBS, rated two steps lower at Aa2 by Moody’s Investors Service and a further three levels lower at A by S&P. RBS promised to make 6 billion pounds available to U.K. borrowers.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the perennial bearer of financial bad news, notes: England has not defaulted since the Middle Ages. There is a real risk it may do so now.  Jim Rogers, who first predicted the current global financial problems in 2006, states:  I would urge you to sell any sterling you might have.  It’s finished. I hate to say it, but I would not put any money in the U.K.

In 1976 the UK was forced to borrow £2.3bn from IMF after the British pound started to slide in March 1976.  A scenario similar to last several months, where the pound has slid from a high of $2 in summer of 2008, to around $1.35.  More critically, the pound is close to hitting parity against the Euro.  Given that the UK injected £37billion into the banking system last autumn, one has to ask what IMF will be asked to do this time to avert the crisis.  IMF has a $200bn (£117bn) available for countries struggling in the financial crisis but given the expected list of borrowers will that be enough?

The most difficult task facing UK is deflation.

The plight facing Britain is uncannily similar to the 1930s, since prices of many assets —from shares to house prices — are falling at record rates, but the value of the debt against which they are held remains unchanged.

This “debt deflation” is among the most painful of all economic phenomena, since it means the amount families owe increases each year even if they borrow no more.

The Treasury has pledged not to let any British bank go down.   Just RBS has liabilities of £1.8 trillion, three times annual UK government spending and more than the GDP of approximately £1.5 trillion.  What is a government to do?  Invest in riot gear perhaps?

Icelanders all but stormed their Parliament last night. It was the first session of the chamber after what might appear to be an unusually long Christmas break….

Bulgaria has been gripped this month by its worst riots since 1997 when street power helped to topple a Socialist government….

In Latvia …. Last week, in a country where demonstrators usually just sing and then go home, 10,000 people besieged parliament.

Iceland, Bulgaria, Latvia: these are not natural protest cultures. Something is going amiss.

Update:

On Friday (16 January), demonstrators attacked the Lithuanian parliament building in Vilnius with stones, smoke bombs, eggs and ice, breaking windows and calling on the government to resign.

Police dispersed the crowds – estimated to number some 7,000 according to authorities, with tear gas and rubber-tipped bullets – while Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius to hold called an emergency cabinet meeting. A total of 86 individuals were arrested.

The two things that leftist bloggers repeatedly commented on when mentioning Bush, was his arrogance and ego.  It seems we will be seeing that in prodigious quantities with Obama.

Can anybody recall Bush being this dismissive toward Democrats?

President Obama listened to Republican gripes about his stimulus package during a meeting with congressional leaders Friday morning – but he also left no doubt about who’s in charge of these negotiations. “I won,” Obama noted matter-of-factly, according to sources familiar with the conversation.

This sort of behaviour is nothing new.  One saw similar thin-skinned behaviour last year.

He notes that Barack Obama’s campaign limited cooperation with the magazine when Newsweek ran a cover photo of arugula last spring to symbolize his elitist image.

Recent press reports comparing Obama to Lincoln and FDR, were obviously not enough to satiate Obama’s ego.  So in a essay that Obama wrote to commemorate Martin Luther King Day, he states:

In the more than two centuries since, inaugurations have taken place during times of war and peace, depression and prosperity. Beneath the unfinished dome of the Capitol, a young lawyer from Illinois swore an oath to defend the Constitution a divided nation threatened to tear apart. In an era of unprecedented crisis, an optimistic New Yorker refused to allow us to succumb to fear. In a time of great change, a young man from Massachusetts convinced us to think anew with regard to serving our fellow man.

Without working a single day as a President, Obama draws comparison to Lincoln, FDR and JFK.  So how did Obama execute his first task as a President?  Your correspondent will let you decide.

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Just remember, he is great orator.

At the request of the Prime Minister, the Minister of Justice has created a departmental committee to examine section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. This is the section which bans hate messages distributed by the Internet. Members include lawyers from various branches of the department of Justice, including constitutional, human rights, criminal and Industry Canada branches.

Whether anyone at this table of worthies will dissent or have evolved from the leftist views with which they entered government in the 1970s is an important question.

Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act has been at the centre of several prosecutions of people for the expression of political opinion.

When will Ezra Levant read Barrelstrength?

The Act states, at section 13:
Hate messages

13. (1) It is a discriminatory practice for a person or a group of persons acting in concert to communicate telephonically or to cause to be so communicated, repeatedly, in whole or in part by means of the facilities of a telecommunication undertaking within the legislative authority of Parliament, any matter that is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt by reason of the fact that that person or those persons are identifiable on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.

Ezra take note. Kathy Shaidle take note. Mark Steyn likewise. You too Kate MacMillan! You saw it here first. We do not normally have news to convey but when we do, we do what we can.

UPDATE: Ezra indeed reads Barrel Strength!