Barrel Strength

In Canada those who dissent from the official line on Gaza from the unbearably pedestrian “Arab Street” are subjected to virulent hisses and dissuasion by the police. In Iran, however, all subtlety is tossed out of the window:

Security agents in plainclothes attacked a group of activists called “Mothers for Peace” who gathered in front of Tehran’s Palestinian Embassy to call for an end to the conflict in Gaza. A journalist told Radio Farda that “security forces who were chanting ‘Death to Peace Seekers’ beat me up, broke my colleague’s camera and used pepper spray on another protester.”

Savour the difference… while you can.

Have you noticed the number of secondary in the Gaza footage? The Israelis hit some mosque or school and the explosions keep on long after, indicating that the places were storehouses of munitions. This is contrary to the laws of war. Storage of weapons and munitions in places of worship or education is a war crime, not that anyone is interested in Islamic war crimes. The only way the Arabs fight is by way of surprise attack upon the defenceless, since every time Arab nations choose to stand and fight, they are smeared by every organized army, with the possible exception of the Iraq-Iran war.

In today’s Globe and Mail, there was this about the Israelis hitting the UN headquarters in Gaza:

“The UN compound [which was] struck Thursday houses the UN Works and Relief Agency, which distributes food aid to hundreds of thousands of destitute Gazans in the tiny seaside territory of 1.4 million people.

“I conveyed my strong protest and outrage to the Defence Minister and Foreign Minister [Tzipi Livni] and demanded a full explanation,” said Mr. Ban, who arrived in Israel on Thursday morning from Egypt.

It had only that morning become a makeshift shelter for 700 Gaza City residents seeking sanctuary from relentless Israeli shelling, UN officials in Gaza said.

John Ging, director of UNRWA operations in Gaza, said the attack at the compound caused a “massive explosion” that wounded three people.

“A senior Israeli military officer said troops opened fire after militants inside the compound shot anti-tank weapons and machine-guns. The officer insisted on anonymity pending a formal army announcement later in the day.”

Massive explosion? From food burning? Fuel going up? Or munitions stored at UNWRA headquarters for the UN’s Islamic buddies?

Also of interest is the deafening silence of Sunni Islamic regimes in regard to Israel’s punishment of Hamas. The Shi’ite-Sunni division is their concern. Hamas is Iran’s catspaw, and the Iranians are Shi’ite. So Israel is doing the work for the Sunnis, this time around. See another Globe article to the same effect.

Perhaps even more interesting has been the relative acceptance among ordinary Canadians of what Israel is doing. Imagine taking roughly 15,000 rocket attacks from a neighbouring slum over the last five years, and not doing anything about it? Even Israel’s many enemies in the West cannot get past that fact.

I spent the morning in traffic listening to some fatuous Brit apologist for Hamas try to persuade me that there were moderates in Hamas whose postion was being undermined by Israel’s ferocious counter-attacks. These same useful idiots used to say the same about getting tough with the Soviets, back when the Russians were the relevant threat. The urge of some people in the West to betray it in every decade is a mystery which needs explaining.

From the New Atlantis magazine, a journal of technology and society, comes this straightforward examination of the physics and chemistry of hydrogen and fuel cells.

Once the basic facts of physics are explained, one wonders what kind of political pressure is needed to sustain funding of this phlogiston science.

By contrast, the author, Robert Zubrin, observes that ethanol and methanol are approaching economic feasability. Whike there are serious concerns about converting foodland to fuel creation, the facts are such that hydrogen and its offshoot, the fuel cell, are radically unfeasible technologies.

It is all very great bosh, as they used to say.

WaPo reports (h/t the corner ) that Obama is about send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan.

President-elect Barack Obama intends to sign off on Pentagon plans to send up to 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, but the incoming administration does not anticipate that the Iraq-like “surge” of forces will significantly change the direction of a conflict that has steadily deteriorated over the past seven years.

The most obvious question is that if they do not anticipate that it “will significantly change the direction of” the conflict in Afghanistan then why do it?  The second question is, why send troops to Afghanistan when the forces of al Qaeda (AQ) are elsewhere, as Obama stated earlier in an interview with Katie Couric.

The problem is when we got distracted by Iraq. We gave al Qaeda time to reconstitute itself. And we now know, based on all the intelligence available to us that they, in fact, have set up safe havens back in Afghanistan, the hills between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

It is indeed unfortunate that the CBS’ resident air-head Katie Couric, didn’t follow up and ask where exactly is this place in “the hills between Afghanistan and Pakistan”.

The broader question of course is why send troops at all to Afghanistan?  Is it just a case of policy inertia?  Everybody agrees that AQ is not in Afghanistan because they concentrated their firepower in Iraq.  A place lot more hospitable in terms of geography and culture, along with a Sunni-Shiite schism that could be exploited.  If Obama is serious about attacking AQ, then he should be sending the troops into Pakistan, instead of relying on pinprick raids by drones.

Obama, the first Canadian President.

My conservative meter is barely moving. The needle of concern hovers over the zero mark. I have conservative friends who were predicting the apocalypse when Obama would ascend to the Oval Office. I could perceive no such danger. I still cannot.

His appointments have been sensible for the most part. The Dark Lord has legitimate concerns for the appointment of a science advisor who has swallowed global warming Kool-Aid. The rest of them seem quite unexceptionable.

The tone is appealing. The portrait of all four living Presidents in the Oval Office was a powerful signal that the new man is accepted as a peer by the Bushes and by the Democrats.  The public statements seem designed to calm the troubled waters.

Am I missing something here? Last night it came to me. Obama is a Canadian. He understands that half the nation did not vote for him, and he has to earn their trust. Yes, he will appoint liberals to the Supreme Court and I will not like their inclinations and decisions. But so far the whole message of Obama seems designed to quell the anxiety of Americans who did not vote for him that the economy will be better managed than it was under Bush the Younger, and that the quality of government appointments will be taken more seriously.

My gravest criticism of Bush the Younger was that the quality of government apointees to run various federal agencies was in several cases inexcusably bad – I think of the FCC and the Emergency Measures Organization. Others could be found equally bad.

Iraq – we have won

Afghanistan – we do not know yet

The quality of management and leadeship in the organs of the US government – appalling.

Where the Republicans had taken their own Kool-Aid, in my opinion, was the belief that since government did not matter, government appointments did not matter. Wrong on both counts.

If the Obama presidency signals a return to the belief that government matters to the health and wealth of the nation, it will have achieved something important immediately.

There is something strangely Canadian about the US President-Elect. A notion that one governs from the middle, not the edges. This is the vibration I have been detecting. I hope I am not mistaken.

With apologies to Leonard Cohen.

The poor get angry, the rich get rich
Thats how it goes
Everybody knows

Cohen – “Everybody Knows”

The current events in the world provide a sober reminder of how tenuous life can be.  The Cold War dividend is a distant memory and almost totally forgotten.  How did things change so suddenly?  Nature abhors vacuum and the disappearance of collectivism led to a void that was replaced by Islam.  The ascendancy of Islam, in secular countries such as UK, has now led to great deal of anger among the poor whites.

The research by the Department for Communities and Local Government found that white working-class communities felt they had been “betrayed” and abandoned by the establishment, which no longer had their concerns at heart.

The Communities Secretary, Hazel Blears, said that politicians had to start engaging with the disenchantment among poorer, white sections of society in order to combat growing “myths” over the treatment of immigrants.

Her department’s report suggested, she said, that the resentment, unfairness and disempowerment perceived by the group together with the absence of an “open and honest discussion” about immigration had created fertile ground for the far-right to exploit.

The Communities Secretary might want to consider some changes very quickly before her department becomes a “myth” as well.  Meanwhile the rich have their own worries.

Merrill Lynch has revealed that some of its richest clients are so alarmed by the state of the financial system and signs of political instability around the world that they are now insisting on the purchase of gold bars, shunning derivatives or “paper” proxies.

That is how it goes till the next revolution.

The continuing decline in interest rates in UK, the lowest since the Bank of England was formed in 1694, could lead to financial events that were never contemplated.

Lawyers suggested that if rates dropped further, borrowers could end up having their mortgage paid for them by their bank.

Eddie Goldsmith, of property law firm Goldsmith Williams, said: “This interest rate cut is bringing lenders and borrowers perilously close to a bloody conflict.

“Many lenders will never have taken into account the prospect of such a drop in rates and will have their lawyers scurrying back to their offices to look at the small print of their mortgage conditions as the prospect of having to pay their borrowers is to awful to contemplate.”

The majority of borrowers with a tracker deal pay the bank rate, plus a percentage on top. But some deals available just over a year ago allowed borrowers to pay the bank rate minus a percentage.

If the bank rate falls much further, these borrowers could be paying negative interest on their mortgage.

In a world where the word “unprecedented” is bandied about recklessly, this is truly unprecedented and mind boggling.  Theoretically the rates can go negative in a deflationary environment, but nobody expected it to be that way in practice.

Thanks to Girl on the Right. Original contest rules here.

The Department of Citizenship and Immigration is holding a contest for people to send a videotape whose purpose is to stop racism.

About the Racism. Stop It!  National Video Competition

Your video will be judged by a jury of professionals based on:

1. Effectiveness and creativity in the communication of the Racism. Stop It! message.
2. Production quality. Even if your idea is brilliant, no television station participating in this initiative will be able to use it for public broadcast if your images or sound are unclear.
3. Sticking to the rules. Your video must:

and so forth.

The department is to be congratulated on its very un-PC insistence that the contestants must stick by rules. No talk here of overturning the hegemony of the phallocentric western-European white rule-abindingness with various forms of feminist third-worldy unintelligible discourse. No sirree! To be judged, the contestants must submit to actual stated criteria, applicable to all.

Is it not ironic that when Canadians criticize Islamic political behaviour in Canada they do so on the same basis, that the laws of Parliament and the rules of Canadian society apply equally to everyone? Shades of the Herouxville Declaration!

And that they are criticized for being “racist” when they do so. Yet when actual judgments have to be made about videotapes, relatively straight-forward marking criteria have to be used in order to create a sufficiently common set of products subject to judgement. You cannot compare a haiku to a sonnet, though each are valid expressions of culture.

So I say to Citizenship and Immigration, the same process of reasoning applies to judging people as it does to judging vieotapes. There has to be agreement about common standards. And  this agreement is neither racist nor wrong in any sense. Other societies might have different standards, and so be it. But this Canadian society has a standard of behaviour, which is not to be messed with for the purpose of  adapting us to immigrants, but rather them to us.

The fact that this kind of contest is still being held in a Conservative regime is a sure sign that the government has not yet sufficiently purged the bureaucracy.