Barrel Strength

Essentially for the same reason that Bismarck favoured the Russians crushing the Polish rebellion. They do for us what we could not do for ourselves. They also allow us to govern all of Canada by letting the Conservatives hold English Canada. It is a sweet deal. We ought to be more grateful to them.

What!!??
Let me explain.

1. The Bloc ties down forty to sixty seats which are not easily available to Conservatives but which might be available to the Liberals. Despite the fact that the Liberals have been weak in Quebec outside of Montreal (RoQ) for a generation, this is  much more their possible territory than it is the Conservitives’.
2. With the Bloc denying the Liberals an easy majority in Quebec, electoral majorities must now be formed in English Canada.
(Think about that for a moment. English Canada is now the electoral pivot)
3. The Conservatives are better able to respond to the needs inclinations and interests of English Canada than the Liberals.
4. Michael Ignatieff and his advisors do not realize this yet.
5. Michael Ignatieff is the last Liberal leader who will fail to realize this.

So I say, thank you Bloc Québécois, for giving us the victory. It should never be forgotten what passionate hatred the French Canadian bear the Liberals for shaming them with the sponsorship scandals of a few years ago. French Canadians in Quebec had cleaned up their politics for a generation, except for the federal Liberals in Quebec. As long as the Bloc chooses not to participate in the federal Cabinet, and consents to receive the benefits of federalism without participating in government, the Conservatives will govern Canada. This suggests that Prime Minister Harper needs to avoid calling them nasty names.

I was talking to the former editor of a major Canadian newspaper and the subject came up why the mainstream media are so relentlessly left-wing, of the we-are-always-wrong school. My friend the Dark Lord had occasioned this discussion by sending me Barbara Oakley’ article on the same subject.
Oakley explains the group think well:
“But, having worked among the Soviets, I know that large groups of very intelligent people can fall into a collective delusion that what they are doing in certain areas is the right thing, when it’s actually not the right thing at all. It’s rather like the Skinnerian viewpoint on psychology. For a full half century, psychologists insisted it wasn’t proper to posit anything going on inside people’s heads. Advances in psychology ground to a halt during that time, but it was impossible to convince mainstream psychologists that there was anything wrong to their approach. After all–everybody was using Skinner’s approach, and everybody couldn’t be wrong.”

We had nothing to add to the view the journalists are mentally lazy conformists who believe, for whatever reasons, that they are morally superior to most conservatives (i.e liberals) as well as the millions of others who do not share their bohemian self-regard. What he did say however, struck home.

“They (mainstream media) will continue to be that way until the last newsroom turns off the lights. And when the last lights are turned off, the Canadian public will say: so what?”

Today’s Dear Abby column features a letter from a Reverend Alton Paris, “American” (sic) who  explains the evolution of the terms used to designate American black people. The letter is instructive because it sets out what an American black man thinks of the various labels applied over time to American blacks/Negroes/African Americans/whatever they are called this decade.

“We were called by many names – most of them negative, such as “Negro”, “Coloured”, “African,” the infamous “N-word,” “Afro-American” and finally, “black.” All of these at one time we considered negative because they didn’t represent self-identification.

“The black power movement occurred when Black Americans changed the negative term “black” to the positive term “Black.”

Eh? How does Black with a capital B constitute positivity and black  with a small b negativity?

The argument comes down to: it is because we say it is.

I am reminded of one of the weirdest things I ever witnessed. About a decade ago, a leftist Canadian woman heard her American leftist friend use the word “Eskimo”, as nearly everyone does in the United States. The Canadian gently pointed out that the correct term for Eskimo was Inuit. What was surprising was the immense gratitude with which the American received this knowledge. It was if the faithful had taken Communion at the hands of the Pope. Her face lit up with pleasure. Now she had the politically correct term, with which she could  correct the speech of other Americans, and another code word to distinguish the politically Saved from the politically Damned. Like Black (enlightened) and black (benighted).

As printed in the Washington Post, so it’s not spin from the VRWC MkII:

… U.S. diplomacy has remained mostly in the hands of one man, Obama’s special envoy to Sudan, retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Scott Gration, who is pushing for normalizing relations with the only country in the world led by a president indicted for war crimes.

[...]

“We’ve got to think about giving out cookies,” said Gration, who was appointed in March. “Kids, countries, they react to gold stars, smiley faces, handshakes, agreements, talk, engagement.

[...]

Ghazi Salahuddin, a close Bashir adviser, praised Gration for “trying to be even-handed.” During a stop in this Darfur capital, Gration was greeted like a rock star by hundreds of cheering Bashir supporters in a conference hall plastered with posters of Bashir with Obama, poorly joined together using a computer.

Oh. Dear. God.

From MSNBC today:

President Obama will travel to Copenhagen to make a pitch for Chicago’s Olympic bid, White House officials have confirmed to NBC News.

Obama will leave for Denmark Thursday night, hours after his wife Michelle departs for the vote. The president made the final decision Saturday night after returning from the G20 summit in Pittsburgh.

From Washington Times today:

The military general credited for capturing Saddam Hussein and killing the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq says he has only spoken to President Obama once since taking command of Afghanistan.

“I’ve talked to the president, since I’ve been here, once on a VTC [video teleconferece],” General Stanley McChrystal told CBS reporter David Martin in a television interview that aired Sunday.

“You’ve talked to him once in 70 days?” Mr. Martin followed up.

“That is correct,” the general replied.

Your correspondent earlier equated the Obama presidential run to mass hysteria in UK  after Diana’s death.  That analogy can now be extended to this shallow celebrity-president who is in love with his own image as others have noted.

http://ezralevant.com/2009/09/chrc-investigates-richard-warm.html

Ishtar 17, 4395 of the 12th year of the  Glorious Reign of Gruppenfuhrer Louis XVI

Memo to the Supreme Council

For decision

from Department of Subversion, Supreme Council, Galactic Racially Aryan Supremacy Party (GRASP)

My Lords:

Agent 117 has been exposed, as you are no doubt aware . His usefulness is nearly over, but as a matter of policy I think the Council sould promote him to the rank of Unteroffizier and give him a medal (I suggest the Silver Swastika with Oak Leaf Clusters)  before he is disgraced and fined by the local emanation of the Dark Side.  When he has returned to us, he can get his back pay from the date of his condemnation.

Such measures may seem generous. Some other Bureaus of the Supreme Council (Treasury and Public Works) consider that Agent 117 has not completely succeeded yet. However most department heads agree with this recommendation. Staff considers that his mission has been wildly successful, and recommends promotion, medal and back pay.

Director BuSub

He hates all kuffar equally. His detestation is religious bigotry, not racism.

Now, do you feel better about his being in Canada? I thought so.

http://www.canada.com/news/Toronto+terror+participant+hated+Muslims+court+told/2024806/story.html

BRAMPTON, Ont. — A Toronto man who admitted Wednesday he was a member of a terrorist group that planned attacks in Canada was caught on police wiretaps saying he hated non-Muslims.

 Ali Mohamed Dirie, a Canadian born in Somalia, called white people the “number 1 filthiest people on the face of the planet. They don’t have Islam. They’re the most filthiest people.”

 He added that: “In Islam there is no racism, we only hate kufar (non-Muslims).”

 The 26-year-old was one of 18 Toronto-area men charged in 2006 in connection with a plot to attack targets in southern Ontario in order to terrorize Canadians into withdrawing troops from Afghanistan.

I thought it might be helpful to remind everyone that Richard Warman is an agent sent to destroy the CHRC and its provincial counterparts.

http://www.barrelstrength.com/2008/04/02/letter-of-commendation-to-agent-117-from-grasp/

I cannot sufficiently emphasize that believers in man-made global warming are deluded as to the extent, causes and cures (none) of and for global climate change. I am rapidly becoming convinced that they should be breezily dismissed, as no doubt they have reached similar conclusions about us. The more I inform myself of the subject of past climate changes, and of the politics of the IPCC, the less probable it appears that humans have anything to do with climate change – with the exception of cutting forests in dry or mountainous countries.

I had a spasm of annoyance with the Very Reverend Geoffrey Simpson, of the Glebe and of the Globe, who dismissed skepticism about global warming as so much flat-earthism. Trust Geoffrey to be wrong about something so vast.

I have been reading into the subject of this government-sponsored delusion for some years. I recommend, for various reasons, the following:
a) Taken by Storm, by Christopher Essex and Ross McKittrick, 2001, updated 2007
b) The Skeptical Environmentalist, 2001 and Cool It, 2008, by Bjorn Lomborg,
c) The Long Summer, How Climate Changed Civilization , and The Little Ice Age 1300- 1850: How Climate made History, by Brian Fagan
d) Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science, by Ian Plimer, 2009

e) The Deniers, by Lawrence Solomon, 2008
f)After the Ice Age, by E.C. Pielou, 1992, which contains the best six pages I have read on the causes of ice ages. Colin Tudge’s Time Before History (1992) also presents the same information on what geologists have considered to be the origin of ice ages.

The last two books, and Fagan’s The Long Summer, make clear that we are are in an interglacial period of roughly 10,000 to 15,000 years, in an otherwise glacial period, where ice has extened much further south. Long Island, Martha’s Vineyard and and Nantucket Island are moraines left behind from the last ice sheet. These glacial periods have lasted off and on for the past several millions of years. In turn, ice ages are themselves extraordinary periods in earth’s history. In the past billion years, there has been ice at the poles for only a fifth of that time.

Each of these books in their ways undermines the central tenets of the Gaian doctrine, as laid out by Essex and McKittrick:

1. The earth is warming
2. Warming has already been observed.
3. Humasn are causing it.
4. All but a handful of scientists on the fringe believe it.
5. Warming is bad.
6. Action is required immediately.
7. Any action is better than none.
8. Claims of uncertainty only cover the ulterior motives of individuals aiming to stop needed action.
9. Those who defend uncertainty are bad people.

Professors Essex and McKittrick take aim at Big Official Science, the fallacy of computer models, and the meaninglessness of “global temeperature”, from a mathematical perspective. Their best line about global temperature, which they call T-Rex, is that has all the validity of an average global telephone number. It was they who exposed the deficiencies of the IPCC study that gave rise to the infamous hockey-stick graph, which obliterated the medieval warm period and the little ice age which followed. Essex and McKittrick are more persuasive to the mathematically inclined. You cannot take seriously a computer projection of climate after reading their explanation of “parameterizations”, that is, fudge factors, that go into every computer model. They explain that, for want of a theory of climate, all we have is models, and we are making up the models.

Fagan’s books cited above, and Plimer’s opening chapters, detail the dramatically bad effects of previous global cooling episodes on civilization and its prospects. A number of events, such as Europe’s Dark Ages, were accompanied by dramatic drops in temperature within historical time, and recoveries occurred when the earth warmed. Warmer climate is associated with more stable temperatures and more certain growing conditions. You cannot read about the effects of previous climate changes without realizing that:

a) climate change has been going on, frequently very suddenly, forever, and

b) warmth is good, cold is bad.

c) these vast changes in the habitability of the planet occurred long before humans had any significant eeffect on the earth.

The Deniers makes clear that the science is by no means settled. Together with Essex and McKittrick, Lomborg and Plimer, it is apparent that we are in the presence of a vast left-wing movement, the direct successor to Marxism, driven by environmentalist doom-sayers, and abetted by governments seeking greater power of their citizenry. Their methods are corrupt, their goal is power, and their motivations, while various, include a spurious atheistic Gaian religion.

The planet does not need saving from carbon dioxide.

The Left wants to make every human action neurotic. What better method than to make breathing a sin? Oxygen in, CO2 out. (I have written about sin and the Gaian releigion at greater length elsewhere.)

Closer acquintance with either the facts of previous climate changes, or the corrupt methods of the IPCC/Gore crowd, will persuade you we are in the presence of something very large, powerful, mistaken and foolish.

Liberal shill and geriatric typist Lawrence Martin comes up with a cunning plan to save Grit fortunes:

There’s a wonderful litmus-test question once posed by Ronald Reagan. In campaigning against Jimmy Carter, the Gipper famously asked whether the country was better off than it had been four years earlier. If the Harper foes put forward that query, they might find more appetite for going to the polls.

Four years ago? As in AdScam?

Indeed.

Martin actually writes, “So far, the Liberals have come at the PM with an empty suitcase.” The suitcase is empty only because they no longer have their hands in the till. And let’s make sure nobody forgets that. Ever.

So there is an outcry from bottom to top that the FLQ manifesto be read out as part of the anniversary of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham.

Why must we suffer again from the narrow provincialism of the pur laine?  Read it out, by all means, but for good measure add in the manifestos of the Baader-Meinhoff Gang and the Unabomber.

Though equally the products of demented criminals, both are considerably more entertaining and the latter may very well be saner than the domestic product.

Still think that they are the poor oppressed victims of history, so they have the right to be bigots and assholes.

MONTREAL – At least now he knows how to say “Quelle heure est-il?”

Muhammad Ahmad Munir, a master’s student from Pakistan studying at McGill University, was kicked off the No. 66 bus at 6:45 Friday morning after he asked the driver what the time was in English.

“I got on the bus and I didn’t have a watch, so I asked the driver for the time,” he said. “She started talking in French and I didn’t understand what she was saying.”

The 32-year-old native of Islamabad came to Montreal a few months ago to enroll in a master’s degree program in Islamic studies at McGill.

After twice telling the bus driver he didn’t understand French, she responded in English, saying: “I don’t speak English.”

“I then told her that she just showed me that she does speak English, and that’s when she really got angry.”

The police were called, the passengers forced off, and more.

I was told recently of German tourists in Ayer’s Cliff, Quebec who were  loudly told off and followed out of the shop into tthe street by an irate Quebecoise who was offended they had asked for bread in her bakery <gasp!> in English!!

“O wad some Power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as ithers see us!” – Robert Burns

Quebec’s language legislation, which tells the Quebecois they have the right – the legal right - to work exlusively in French – has created a vast sheltered workshop. Occasionally it takes a foreigner unaccustomed to this folly hold up the mirror to them. As friend once said, why is it that shopkeepers in Ramallah (or Bangkok) can express themselves  in English better than most Quebecois?

This entry is about learning and teaching. In an earlier posting I ranted about how no one actually knows how to do anything practical anymore, such as observe the problem, reframe it if necessary, and solve it.  Today’s sermon is taken from recent experiences with the people mentioned in the title to this posting.

I have three kids of my own, two step-children by a recent marriage, aged 18 and 26, and a son-in-law, aged 41.

There comes a time when the young ones are ready to learn. Once upon a time, it might have been when they were twelve or thirteen; now with advances in technology and the extension of schooling, it seems to come after they have turned twenty five.

Three cases in point:

Read the rest…

For a man who is descended from ministers to two Tsars, Ignatieff seems to have forgotten a key element of the old family gameplan: a summer mobilization when your enemy has no need of a dicey Schlieffen plan is itself fraught with potential disaster. And does he think his last flirtation with a Triple Entente will be any more successful?

True, this time the war will be over by Christmas but the Russian nobility may be pulled down by the Reds much sooner than the last time around.

Fundamental to a functioning democracy is an educated and informed electorate.  The last US presidential election exemplified a gullible electorate that was unable to think independently or logically.  Well the “stupid American” can take a rest now and make room for the dumb Japanese.

Wife of Japan’s Prime Minister-elect claims that she was once abducted by aliens and has been to the planet Venus.  She also knew Tom Cruise very well – in his previous incarnation when he was Japanese.

There was a time when views like that got you locked up with a lifetime supply of lithium pills, but these days it is just an alternative point of view.  In 1972 the world was like this: “Subsequently, the paper published an attack on the character of Muskie’s wife Jane, reporting that she drank and used off-color language during the campaign. Muskie made an emotional defense of his wife in a speech outside the newspaper’s offices during a snowstorm. Though Muskie later stated that what had appeared to the press as tears were actually melted snowflakes, the press reported that Muskie broke down and cried, shattering the candidate’s image as calm and reasoned.”