Barrel Strength

Geert Wilders spoke in Florida recently. His speech can be found on Youtube, but in case you are in a meeting where you cannot play the video, reading this may arouse your sympathies.

GEERT WILDERS’ FREEDOM OF SPEECH SUMMIT

I wish I had come to a place they call they call sunshine state with better news but it would be very unwise to deny that the situation indeed is very gloomy, and it might take a while for you to understand the situation that we are in now. Maybe you as Americans still think that Europe is a place with a great culture and a profound way of looking at things. Maybe you see immigration as something that is inherently good for our country as it contributed so much for the United States, and I understand that. But Ladies and Gentleman the Europe as you know it from visiting Europe or from stories from your parents or friends or whoever, is on the verge of collapsing.

We are now witnessing profound changes that will forever alter Europe’s destiny and might send the Continent in what Ronald Reagan once called: “A thousand years of darkness.

And the takeover of Europe, that is currently taking place, is part of a global fight, a global fight of Islam for World domination.

Let me tell you first, that Islam is not a religion. Islam is a totalitarian political ideology. Islam hearts lies at the Koran and the Koran is a book that calls for hatred, that calls for violence, for murder, for terrorism, for war and submission.

The Koran calls upon Muslims to kill Kuffars, non-Muslims. The Koran describes Jews as monkeys and pigs, and Churchill, and I agree with him, Churchill compared the Koran, the book in the 50’s, to Adolf Hitlers book Mein Kampf.

Ladies and Gentleman the core of the problem with Islam is twofold, First, the commands of the Koran are not limited by place or time, they apply for all time, to all Muslims of the World.

Read the rest…

Below are the Gallup poll results for percentage of the public, that believes that a president is doing a “excellent/good job”, after the first 100-days in office.

Obama 2009 56%
Bush 2001 62%
Clinton, 1993 55%
Bush, 1989 58%
Reagan, 1981 67%
Carter, 1977 63%
Nixon, 1969 61%
Sampling error: +/-3% pts

This places Obama’s rating as second-worst when compared to the sample of last seven presidents.  Obama squeaked by America’s first-black-president by one single percentage point.

One of the knocks against Obama has been that he is excessively deferential as shown by the fact that he bowed to the Saudi king.  In addition to that solitary event, he also obsequiously follows TOTUS on a regular basis.  It seems that he has finally found his spine.

Politico reports today that POTUS had the audacity to talk back to TOTUS!

“In addition to John – sorry, the – I just noticed I jumped the gun here,” Obama said, pausing for several seconds as he looked at the prompter. “Go ahead. Move it up. I had already introduced all you guys.”

There were those who said that the elevation of Borat Barack Obama would restore the importance of government appointments, which was exemplified in the Bush administration by attempts to appoint Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.  How has that promise worked out?  Your correspondent noted the following in a post in February of this year:

Meanwhile, the sources said, Obama’s senior economic advisers were hobbled in crafting the plan by a shortage of personnel. To date, the president has not nominated any assistant secretaries or undersecretaries at the Treasury, and the handful of mid-level staffers who have started work were still finding their offices and getting their building passes and BlackBerrys.

This was followed by a post in March of this year, which noted the following regarding the upcoming G20 meeting:

In an extraordinary blunder, the usually-guarded Sir Gus said no-one in the U.S. Treasury department was answering telephone calls.

He said it meant the Government was finding it ‘unbelievably difficult’ to hold discussions ahead of the meeting of world leaders in London.

It seems the appointment problems are not limited to the Treasury Dept.  Today we learn this.

The Obama administration declared a “public health emergency” Sunday to confront the swine flu — but is heading into its first medical outbreak without a secretary of Health and Human Services or appointees in any of the department’s 19 key posts.

President Barack Obama has not yet chosen a surgeon general or the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. His choice to run the Food and Drug Administration awaits confirmation.

Is it any wonder that we read reports like this?

U.S. public health officials did not know about a growing outbreak of swine flu in Mexico until nearly a week after that country started invoking protective measures, and didn’t learn that the deaths were caused by a rare strain of the influenza until after Canadian officials did.

It is indeed fortunate that US is being led by the “intensely intelligent” and the “intellectually curious“.

George Friedman is head of Stratfor, a strategic forecasting firm whose analysis may have passed by your desk from time to time.

Friedman has written a most entertaining romp through the next hundred years. Whether right or wrong he helps open one’s mind to the larger picture. Friedman’s intellectual base is in demography, geography and technology: geopolitics. Religion figures little in his view of the next century, whereas I think it is already the prime driving force of the next confrontation, in the form of Islam.

Major predictions:

• The rise of the United States is only beginning. As the only power to bestride the sea lanes between Europe and Asia, with command of both shores, and of inner (near earth)  space,  it is going to continue to rise in importance through the next century.
• China will implode.
• Europe is decadent.
• The Islamic challenge never will amount to much, though Turkey will become a major power by the middle of the century.

Major observations:

• Population growth is crashing everywhere, to be followed by population loss in almost all major countries, with the United states least affected.
• Global warming is irrelevant.
• The computer will continue to reshape economic activity.

My take-away was from his early chapter, on the distinction between barbarism, civilization, and decadence.

• barbarism is the belief that the mores and virtues of your tribe or village are what all of humanity should embrace, and you are ready to take fire and sword to your neighbours or foreigners to make them agree.
• Civilization is the acceptance that the world is full of barbarians and that one needs to fight  selectively, if barbarically, to save civilized codes of conduct.
• Decadence is the belief that there is no real distinction between civilization and barbarism, and if there is, it is hardly worth fighting for.

On the computer, he says that it causes us to de-emphasize all aspects of reality and of our engagement with it that cannot be quantified – the contemplative, the playful, the religious. The corporation is the creature of the quantitification of the computer, and no one can compete with the United States who does not embrace the methods of the computer. To the extent that the computer does not allow for any values other than its own, it is barbaric in the sense of the term used above, and the corporation is a barbarian: exclusively focused on the goals, rules and mores of its own tribe.

I recommend it for a fast read.

Wall St.

During the campaign, Obama was never shy about his promise to undo the Bush tax policies. But it was easy to ignore his occasional lapses into populist rhetoric and focus on his intense intelligence and Ivy League education. Now, in the wake of the crisis, Wall Street’s politics are shifting rightward. “All the rich people I know took George Bush for granted,” says an analyst at a midtown hedge fund. “I’m a Democrat, but I agree with Rush Limbaugh on a lot of this stuff,” rails the wife of a former AIG executive.

Main St.

As a senator, Barack Obama led the charge last year to pass a bill allowing black farmers to seek new discrimination claims against the Agriculture Department. Now he is president, and his administration so far is acting like it wants the potentially budget-busting lawsuits to go away.

The change isn’t sitting well with black farmers who thought they’d get a friendlier reception from Obama after years of resistance from President George W. Bush.

“You can’t blame it on the Bush administration anymore,” said John Boyd, head of the National Black Farmers Association, which has organized the lawsuits. “I can’t figure out for the life of me why the president wouldn’t want to implement a bill that he fought for as a U.S. senator.”

As your correspondent noted in July 2008 during the election campaign, this was a case of mass hysteria akin to the Diana funeral in UK and all logic was suspended.  One can empathize with the black farmers, as they voted along racial lines, along with the rest of the black people, but what can one say about the supposedly supremely rational Masters of the Universe on Wall St.  Perhaps it could be worse because they could have been fooled by other means.

It was twenty-seven years ago that SCTV aired its wickedly accurate spoof of CBC programming. And now the Mother Corpse is living out the fantasy with its rollout of new shows:

Battle of the Blades is an elimination-style challenge that teams up Canada’s top figure skaters with this country’s most daring and versatile hockey stars to compete against one another each week in a glitzy pairs figure skating performance.

[...]

The Republic of Doyle: is a one-hour comedic drama about a father-son team of private investigators. Set against the rugged beauty of St. John’s Newfoundland, it’s an original, entertaining glimpse into the dynamics of the dysfunctional Doyle clan.

All that’s missing from the first one is colour commentary by Howie McMeeker, and we would hope that the second has as its lead-in “Magnum: PEI”.

Oh. Dear. Lord.

One opinion that is prevalent in the leftist circles is that those on the right are stupid.  In fact “stupid conservative” is suppose to be a redundant phrase, like irregardless or an intelligent-Canadian-Cynic-post.  Now there is a survey that can shed light on this question and it notes the following.

Across the 12 knowledge items tested, the biggest gap between Democrats and Republicans comes over awareness of the current level of the Dow. Republicans also are more likely to correctly name Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and know that Tim Geithner’s position is treasury secretary. In addition, a greater percentage of Republicans than Democrats know that Obama decided to increase the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and that Ford is the U.S. automaker that has not taken emergency government loans.

But there is little or no partisan gap in knowledge on some other key items: Democrats and Republicans are about equally likely to know that China holds the most U.S. debt, that Hillary Clinton is secretary of state and that roughly 4,300 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq.

The differences in knowledge levels between Republicans and Democrats are mostly a reflection of the different demographics of the two groups. Republicans tend to be older, more educated, higher income and are more likely to be male; each of these characteristics is strongly associated with political and economic knowledge. When these characteristics are held constant — that is, when Republicans and Democrats with similar demographic characteristics are compared — there is little difference between the two groups.

It seems that the facts totally contradict this “reality-based community” canard.  Other than question about the number of US troops killed in Iraq, on which the difference is within the statistical error range, Republican voters are consistently more knowledgeable.  Democrats do particularly poorly on economic items and don’t seem to be engaged in that sector. Of the three groups, Republican, Democrat and Independents, the Democrats are the dumbest of the bunch when it comes to economic facts and the Independents take the cake with non-economic facts.

Perhaps all those cliches about Democrats being dependent on the public sector have some validity.  Too bad they can’t hand out intelligence so that they can join reality.  Of course this doesn’t stop the Democrats from assuming an air of superiority, as the following part of the survey shows.  Democrats are the least knowledgeable when it comes to the economic situation, but they claim to understand the facts surrounding it much better than Independent voters.

George Grant was one of those people whom I would feel it a privilege to have known, and I could never have agreed with him, not even as a late teenager when he first came to my attention. Grant was a Canadian philosopher who wrote the famous “Lament for a Nation”, a long diatribe against the Liberals and all their ilk, their policies of continental integration, and the loss of connection to the British strains of conservatism that, in his view, were vanishing from Canada.

The question he never asked himself was whether the Canada he lamented had ever existed outside his mind and some tiny circles of imperialists in Upper Canada. If you look at the geography of North America, you will observe that the Great Lakes region is drained by the Saint Lawrence. The continent is one: the political division between Canada and the United States is real, but artificial. The distinctions between Quebec and the rest of the continent are deeper than the distinctions between English Canada and the United States. I don’t feel I have reached a truly foreign part of the United States until I cross the Mason-Dixon line. Ontario and Michigan are populated by much the same people, and they live in much the same way, in houses and cities of the same pattern. My ancestors spent 145 years in New England before the Revolution, and I do not view the Republic as my enemy. They are just people who have gone on a so-far-successful political experiment, which more freely acknowledges its English origins tha this country. If and when they finally admit the errors of their ways, we shall welcome them back with open arms. And if not, we can always echo Chou En-Lai when asked whether the French Revolution was a success. “Too soon to tell” was his reply.

George Grant was an “impossibilist” politically – the country he postulated to exist never has existed. Contrary to Grant, the division between loyalists and rebel Americans is not cosmic, however bitter this dvisdion was in 1780. One branch of English protestant whig Americans opted for cutting the ties to the new fangled British Empire that was emerging in the 18th century, because they felt themselves to have always been independent. Another branch of English protestant whig Americans, the Loyalists, said that they would prefer one tyrant 3,000 miles away to 3,000 tyrants one mile away. From such narrow differences the two countries have sprung, and neither George Grant nor contemporary leftists can make these differences more important than they are.

I met the Anglican priest who had been present at the death of George Grant, and who told me he was sure he had been in the presence of a saint. I inquired of his impossibilist politics. “Oh the man was a complete fool politically.” And that, my friends, admirably sums him up: a great-souled man who lamented the loss of something that had never been there, and mistook the nature of what it is to be a conservative in North America. The differences between the United States and Canada may be significant from the point of view of English-speaking politics; but in the great scheme of things I doubt they are more than minor flavour differences between red wines. The differences between the American South and New England are at least as large as between Ontario and New England. We have a state and the Queen on the coin; the Confederacy never managed to secede. For a minor political flavour difference, Canadians are doing okay.

The current Liberal leader, Michael Ignatieff, has written a book about his ancestors on his mother’s side, the Parkins and the Grants, among whom was his uncle, George Grant. Ignatieff says of Uncle George:

“You can still read Lament for a Nation now, 50 years later, and disagree with every page, and still think it the greatest 90 pages ever written about our country.”

I am not as generous towards Uncle George. To the extent he has had any influence, Grant has seriously distorted what conservatism ever could be in this country by associating it with a fuddy-duddy anti-Americanism, a nostalgia for Britishness. It also was bathed in a hostility to mechanical improvements (now known as technological advance), one that seemed to blame America for the things by which it is has principally benfited mankind: cellphones, cars, intermittent wipers, double-edged razors, television, new business models, and the Internet. George Grant was issuing a scream of protest against modernity as such. Considering that the relevant issue of the time was the survival of parliamentary forms of government against the Soviet Union and the communism which informed it, lamenting the economic and technical integration of Canada with the United States, and the placing of nuclear missiles in Canada, was ridiculous.

I hope the Conservatives have the wit to agree with Ignatieff on this one. Uncle George is buried. The Canada he lamented was a construct of his quite limited range of sympathies and lack of historical knowledge. I only wish I had ever been in the presence of the Christian George Grant, rather than a reader of the mistaken conservative George Grant. That man, the priest confessed, was great. I believe him.

The President’s recent approval of the rescue mission for an American merchant captain is a laudable start but it must lead to a genuine campaign to end the scourge of Somali piracy. Teddy Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison had the fortitude to take real action. So here’s my three-point plan in their tradition:

1. Treat pirates as pirates
   No more nonsense about “irregular combatants” or poster children for the Geneva Conventions. These people are brigands and there is long precedent in admiralty law for dealing with them. Uncooperative vessels in designated waters are fair game for lethal force. Rope, yardarm, pirate: some assembly required.
    
2. Letters of Marque
   Queen Bess’ Sea Hawks did admirable service against the perfidious Spanish and bounty hunting is a storied American tradition. Give Blackwater a chance to redeem itself after its failings in Iraq. Share the wealth, America.
    
3. Shock and Awe Mk 2
   So these pirate chaps have a lair? Time to liven it up with Operation Quarterback 3, hosted by the B2 Spirit bomber. Really, who doesn’t love an airshow?

[youtube olGwSyouBms]

I have this plan. I want to control the Internet. I find there is way too much free speech out there, particularly racist, sexist, right-wing hate speech. Yes, you are right. I have cracked. I have finally seen the error of my ways. I now acknowledge the importance of controlling speech from a human rights perspective, as Barbara Hall would have it. People should be accountable for what they say. How can this be done? How can Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn be countered? How can we end the seedy careers of Kathy Shaidle and her ilk?

Simple. Declare the Internet is broadcasting. No, I don’t mean broadcasting over the air. I mean “broadcasting” as in the Canadian Broadcasting Act: the propagation through a transmission medium of signals composed predominantly of full-motion video, or music.

No, please, I am not kidding. The Canadian Thought Control Commission (CTCC, formerly known as the CRTC) could spend a great deal of time estimating whether the inclusion of a video feed into a blog turns it into “broadcasting”. It could embroil the blogosphere in years of apprehension, litigation and speech “chill”. What fun! Jobs forever!

Consider the advantages:

Read the rest…

“You know what? I think George Bush wishes that everybody was rich. I think Barack Obama wishes that everybody was poor.”

O’Reilly had to more or less goad him into it but sometimes that’s what it takes.

Weekly hit of Miller on O’Reilly counteracts the snivelling Liberal and liberal media an’ dis kanaka recommend it.

The Obama campaign was one of the best stage managed political production and he rightly won the title of a “great campaigner”.  Lot of leftist pointed to that as a qualification for presidency, i.e. he ran such a great campaign and that it showed his obvious qualifications for POTUS.  The campaign is always a set-piece, with prepared remarks and one doesn’t have the luxury to do that during the presidency.  Or does one?!  Obama responded as follows to the US hostage crisis off Somalia.

Obama was asked to comment on the situation several times by reporters at a White House event on refinancing for homeowners. Obama, however, stuck closely to the script and replied that he wanted to remain focused on housing.

Axelrod, please update TOTUS immediately!

Kicking up the old-school crazy, Lawrence Martin channels Canada’s Great Satan™ for global nuclear disarmament. Because, of course, the only way to convince loony foreigners to forego nukes is to start out by sacrificing all of your trump cards. At least that’s how The One appears to be playing Texas Fold ‘em on the world stage.

In summary, take it away, DCI Gene Hunt:

[youtube D5XnpK5Hzo0]

The astonishing video of President Obama abasing himself before Saudi wealth only has the power to influence opinion if people see it.   A check of Google News indicates that it received scant attention in the mainstream.  On Youtube, there are at least a dozen versions of the President demonstrating, with unmistakable and sickening clarity, his own estimate of his worth relative to that of Abdullah.  Like the anti-tax Tea Parties that are growing in the United States, this incident has been ignored by conventional news outlets.  As I so tediously insist to my intimates, it is all one war.  These media episodes are instructive skirmishes.  Should the number of Youtube views of such embarrassments as Obama bending the knee to a self-styled monarch approach the audience of a network TV hour, will that network TV hour begin to alter its news judgment?  News from the front, my friends.  From municipal social housing policies to Predator strikes in the tribal areas, this is all one war.