Barrel Strength

There are two articles of interest floating about the blogosphere this weekend and I want to bring them to your attention. First is the suppression of scientific evidence by the Environmental protection Agency. Second is the absolute swindle encompassed by cap and trade. The two are part of a vast conspiracy to loot the poor (everyone below a billion dollars of personal wealth) for the benefit of a few of the really rich. I wanted to say “left-wing” conspiracy but I am not sure that looting the treasury and social wealth on such a scale can be left wing or right wing; it transcends such ideas.

First: create the hysteria for which your legislation is the solution. Carbon dioxide, the natural process of all combustion, is named as a pollutant, despite its fundamental role as the life-giver to lamnts.

Second: create a market which appears to reduce CO2 emissions while actually filling the pockets of the very very rich with the revenues from carbon-dixide licences (caps) which are “traded”. How do you do this? Reduce the amnunt of caps by law.

First: bad science

 You will have read about this elsewhere in an article by Declan McCullough, about the suppressed report on carbon dioxide. The report says, in its executive summary, about the science of global warming:

•  that the US is acting principally on the IPCC report of three years ago;

that, since that time, and in contrast to what the IPCC predicted:

• global temperatures have been in decline while CO2 emissions have increased;
• Atlantic hurricanes are not increasing in severity
• Greenland ice is not diminishing
• the recession has greatly reduced greenhouse gas emissions below IPCC estimates
• that solar data (how much the earth is warmed by the sun) was downplayed in the IPCC report, contrary to evidence.

You can read the rest of the report for yourselves. Evidence ignored. Evidence suppressed. Bad science driving out good science. Read the rest…

There was discussion at the office the other day concerning the traditional formula for the distribution of federal money.

Earlier in the process we had automatically allocated one third for French-language companies and two-thirds for English language companies.

Why, you ask, is the “traditional”, accepted, automatic division when the population division is roughly one quarter French-speaking and three quarters English-speaking?

Several reasons are used. First, the language divisions are not as clear-cut as you might think. Second, some rough-justice allocations started in the 1970s and have continued ever since unchanged, guarded by the French-Canadian members of the government.

The 2006 census reports the following division of the country by mother tongues:

English                                        57.2%

French                                         21.8%

Both E&F                                      0.3%

Other                                            19.7%

English and Other                      0.8%

French and Other                      0.1%

http://www12.statcan.ca/census-recensement/2006/dp-pd/hlt/97-555/T401-eng.cfm?Lang=E&T=401&GH=4&SC=1&S=99&O=A

So the question becomes: Is there a fair way to divide the nearly 20% of Canadians who have neither French nor English as their mother tongue, for the purposes of allocating federal money to only two language groups?

You can play with the stats in many different ways. For instance, you can divide the other category proportionately to the presence of English and French in the total population. Thus you take 57.2% of 19.7% allophone figure for the English language share, and 21.8% of 19.7% figure for the French language share.

Alternatively you can find statistics for who speaks English at home and who speaks French at home and divide the allophone figures according to those two numbers.

Taking figures from the 2001 census ( a little old but all I could find), we find:

“The proportion of the population that spoke English most often at home, 67.5%, was appreciably higher than the proportion whose mother tongue was English (59.1%). This was due to the attraction of English for members of other language groups. Even in Quebec, where anglophones represent a minority, the same situation prevails.

“Only 10.5% of the population spoke a non-official language most often at home, far lower than the 18.0% who reported a non-official language as mother tongue. These individuals adopted one or the other official language as home language. Generally speaking, the longer immigrants stay in Canada, the more likely they are to speak English or French at home.”

I did the figures both ways: calculating English spoken at home and by dividing the allophone figures by the proportions of English and French mother-tonguers. Either way it comes out to a bit over 67% of the population which speaks English regularly.

Accordingly a rough 70-30 division of federal spending between the two language groups is fair, if  you accept that proportion of the population speaking English or French is the appropriate basis of division. On the other hand, if you think that French gets two thirds because of their special needs or special status, you will not be pleased.

The SCOTUS Scores site provides an intriguing statistical depiction of the ideological shifts in the court from 1937 to 2007, employing the Martin-Quinn Scores methodology.

H/T Slashdot.org

http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2009/2009-329.htm

This is an important decision. Consider the alternative, that the CRTC would licence speakers, authors, writers, photographers, downloaders, musicians or bloggers, or “exempt” them from broadcast licencing, on condition, of course, of being good or paying a tax. It is rare that government turns down an opportunity to regulate.

Of note is the concurring opinion of Commissioner Denton, who rips into the Broadcasting Act with a vengeance.

Where is the blogosphere on this? Asleep?

This is perhaps the most unwittingly damning self-confession of liberal relativism I have encountered:

It’s about attempting to understand people who are radically different from you, and saying to them you want their voice in the process. Tolerance isn’t just a value you hold, so much as it’s something you do repeatedly. It’s uncomfortable. You fuck up. You go to parties where they play music that you don’t know how to dance to. You go to restaurants where the food is difference. You go to neighborhoods, where no one speaks English. The whole time people on the outside are laughing at you. The people you’re trying to understand get pissed at you, and call you racist, homophobe, bigot, sexist etc.

But they ultimately respect you for trying. And you get better. You pick up bits of a second language. You learn to like the food, to enjoy the music. And then one day you look up, and lo and behold, it seems like the whole world is dancing to that same music, eating that same food.

Because, of course, the end-game of multiculti tolerance is one nation united in its devotion to funky restaurants, the world music programming on Radio Two, endless afternoons of hacky-sack and blissful amnesia about the real world around you.

The chap on the phone wanted to know if I would support the Conservative Party.  I said I would support the Conservative Party when the Conservative Party supported free speech.  My parting words were a request that he pass the message along, but I doubt he did.  I could have mentioned the need for a review of immigration policy, and the truly insane over-spending but he caught me a little unprepared, and free speech was about all he had time for anyway.

The One’s new tone of accommodation towards the Islamic world isn’t playing in Peshawar, much less Peoria:

A message attributed to the deputy leader of al-Qaeda has denounced Barack Obama as a “criminal” on the eve of the US president’s Middle East trip. Ayman al-Zawahiri said Mr Obama’s “bloody messages” would not be concealed by “polished words”

[...]

He called Mr Obama “that criminal who came seeking, with deception, to obtain what he failed to achieve on the ground after the mujahideen ruined the project of the Crusader America in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia”.

[...]

[Obama] will travel to Egypt on Thursday, where he will make a speech at Cairo University. In the audience will be 10 senior figures from the banned Islamist group the Muslim Brotherhood, the BBC’s Christian Fraser reports from Cairo.

And the Muslim Brotherhood is equally charmed by the prospect of that visit.

So is the Salafist troglodyte community.

A very interesting analysis of the public finances of the United States compared to those of Canada. Upsets all stereotypes. Courtesy of the Brussels Journal.
The author reviews the data and concludes:

“The current Canadian government is a ‘conservative’ one, but its hold on power is tenuous because it is also a ‘minority’ government (in Parliament). It has little to do with the positive trends outlined above, since it came only to power fairly recently. That means that the credit for these positive trends goes largely to the center-left governments that have governed Canada for much of the past two decades and who have implemented major fiscal and some structural economic reforms that have made these numbers possible. And there are also indications that the Canadian banking system is in much better shape then the American one. Meanwhile, in the USA, many Republicans have been profligate with the public purse in recent years, and much of the political left marches today in the opposite direction from the one taken by recent Canadian center-left governments. And Obama-mania on the part of the mainstream media is not going to make matters better…before the next election cycle.”