Barrel Strength

Soon-to-be-former Prime Minister Gordon Brown had a run-in with a real elector the other day.  His shock upon confronting the real opinions of an elector was so great that he was overheard to call her a bigot for mentioning the very large number of Eastern Europeans immigrating to Britain. 

Mrs Duffy, a lifelong Labour supporter, had the temerity to tackle Gordon Brown on the national debt, education and his party’s immigration policy.

Worse than leaving the microphone on, he was heard to blame the entire idea of meeting an elector.

Brown: That was a disaster. Should never have put me with that woman. Whose idea was that?

Aide: I don’t know, I didn’t see.

Brown: Sue’s, I think. Just ridiculous.

Aide: Not sure if they’ll go with that one.

Brown: They will.

Aide: What did she say?

Brown: Everything. She’s just this sort of bigoted woman who said she used to be a Labour voter. Ridiculous.

Just ridiculous to endure the unscripted opinions of the electorate!

As anyone who has campaigned knows, you meet some real wackos going door-to-door. But Gillian Duffy is not that type. She is a solid and sensisble Labour supporter, and, from earlier reports in the papers, a former councilwoman and a hospital volunteer. Not the sort to blather on about the intergalactic conspiracy of Masonic-Judeo-Bolshevik mentats out to destroy our way of life.

The shock of meeting someone from outside the bubble (of political correctness) was more than Gordon Brown could stand.

Sort of reminds me of Allan Rock: the kind of guy who arrives at a summer barbecue where people are drinking wine and eating meat who announces pompously that neither he nor his  wife drink alcohol or eat meat. Who has his subordinate warn Ann Coulter of the limits of expression in thought-controlled Canada. Who wants your rifle registered with the state. Who finds himself out of power, the place where Gordon Brown will also shortly find hismelf.

These people must be driven frompower everywhere. But who are they?

As I do not participate in the classes where they learn to obey their alien overlords, I cannot be sure. The Gordon Browns and Allan Rocks of this world seem to combine invincible ignorance of the real world  and the humans who compose it with invincible sense of entitlement to govern it in the name of improving us, to bring us up to their exalted level of political correctness. They are shocked, shocked to discover that people might actually have formed negative views about high rates of taxes, immigration, or crime, and declining standards of education, civility and garbage removal.

Theodore Dalrymple, the most perceptive chronicler of this species of human, and the Orwell of our age, was once in conversation with a dining-room full of Allan Rocks and Gordon Browns. Despite thirty years’ worth of close acquaintance with the dysfunctional behaviours of the lower classes, caused in large part by the welfare policies supported by the people at the dinner party, he was unable to persuade of the most elementary facts he had observed.  People who could not cook, clean, or take care of themselves or their bastard children, and whose behaviour could only be described as intensely self-destructive.

Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. Unfortunately, the form of madness taken by the Gordon Browns and Allan Rocks of this world is the entire set of conventional left-wing beliefs, and they are impervious to fact, criticism, or revision.

The volcanic ash cloud that stopped airtraffic for several days was less than one twentieth the level that would have caused damage to aircraft engines, report’s The Daily Mail.  Junk science in the service of alarmists. Where have we heard this before?

The airplane that could have accurately determined what the level of ash was, was in the shop for a paint job. So they turned to computer models, you know, the kind that determine whether the planet is warming.

“The National Air Traffic Control Service decision to ban flights was based on Met Office computer models which painted a picture of a cloud of ash being blown south from the Eyjafjallajokull volcano.”

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1268794/Remember-ash-cloud-It-didnt-exist-says-new-evidence.html#ixzz0mDh8Ijzu

For years you railed against the CBC’s anti-conservative bias, and for as long people would tell you you were dreaming:  that the CBC is objective, unbiassed, and fair. Bullshit! Then comes Frank Graves, CBC pollster, telling the Liberals to wage jihad against those homo-phobic, xeno-phobic western-based Conservatives, those Christians!

In his advice, Mr. Graves could hardly have been more blunt. “I told them that they should invoke a culture war. Cosmopolitanism versus parochialism, secularism versus moralism, Obama versus Palin, tolerance versus racism and homophobia, democracy versus autocracy. If the cranky old men in Alberta don’t like it, too bad. Go south and vote for Palin.”

The Grits haven’t told him whether they favour this approach or not. But they are keen on projecting a more activist agenda for the party.

• opposing the end of the long-gun registry;
• supporting the requirement to make  Supreme Court appointees fully capable of hearing a French-language brief, without translation, thus limiting the Supreme Court to some 10% of the Canadian population or less, most of whom would be French-Canadian.

Ezra Levant is doing an excellent job of showing how many millions Frank Graves has taken out of the Liberal government Hey! for $61 million I can be bought and stay bought, too.

But the CBC! Now you know how they are advised and whom they hire. Like advises like. I know the senior management, personally, and I can assure you they are exactly as you imagine them, true to the values of the organization: statist, elitist, privilege-seeking, and feeding at the taxpayers’ trough. And believe me, to them you are just little people. Little people don’t count, and their values count for less.

… but can you keep Chicago from bringing the President under impeachment?  I always thought turning his back on Rod Blagojevich was a stupidly bad idea.  Who’s more connected downtown?  Bill Ayers got your back?  This is Obama versus a Chicago politician who wants to stay out of jail.  Stay tuned. Estimates that put Obama out of office next summer might be optimistic.

Ujjal Dosanjh blames excessive tolerance of Canadians for multi-cultural diversity for turning a blind eye to terrorism and thuggish behaviour.

“Meanwhile, Mr. Dosanjh blamed what he described as Canada’s polite brand of multiculturalism for giving extremists the space to nurture old grudges brought from their homelands. At the same time, Canada has failed to instill its own values on new immigrants.

“I think what we are doing to this country is that this idea of multiculturalism has been completely distorted, turned on its head to essentially claim that anything anyone believes – no matter how ridiculous and outrageous it might be – is okay and acceptable in the name of diversity.

“Where we have gone wrong in this pursuit of multiculturalism is that there is no adherence to core values, the core Canadian values, which [are]: That you don’t threaten people who differ with you; you don’t go attack them personally; you don’t terrorize the populace.”

Dosanjh has been both a Member of Parliament as federal Liberal and member of the provincial legislature of  British Columbia for the NDP. Can I ask which parties have been responsible for relentlessly pushing  this “polite brand of multiculturalism”, and which have relentlessly slandered any person or party who did not mindlessly sing  its praises? Who constricted debate? Enoch Powell indeed.

Ontario is to introduce more explicit sexual education at younger ages, says the Globe and Mail.

Pre-pubescent children have enough difficulty suppressing their natural disgust at the way wholly biological way in which they were generated, let alone getting them to consider homosexual sex, that I imagine many children will be sent to the principal’s office for making “insensitive” remarks. Given the Ontario Liberal government, I assume it is intended to advance some gay-friendly agenda, namely that gay is normal, whatever that means, and young kids had better get used to it, regardless of their parents’ feelings.

Let us ignore the substance of the issue for a moment, which is the wisdom and efficacy of this form of education, and ponder how the government justifies the decision. Responding to the accusation that the curriculum is being modified to appease a lesbian Minister of the government, the article says:

The curriculum hadn’t been reviewed since 1998, and the changes reflect Ontario’s diverse societyand have nothing to do with Ms. Wynne, who is now Transportation Minister, said Michelle Despault, a spokeswoman for Education Minister Lorna Dombrowsky.

“As a government, we have a commitment to provide a curriculum that is both equitable and inclusive,” she said.

Notice how “diverse”, “equitable” and “inclusive” are summoned to replace “good”, “suitable”, “appropriate”, and “sensible”. And as I decode the message, it becomes apparent that the diversity, equity and inclusiveness under discussion refer to the presence of same-sex parents sending their children to school. I do not think it refers to Islamic families: their tendency to marry first cousins,  remove their daughter’s clitorises, or drown them for looking at boys.   Just wait, however, for that to be justified as diverse, equitable, and inclusive.

Corey Doctorow writes good fiction for young adults, and his Little Brother is a stirring tale of a seventeen year old computer hacker defeating Homeland Security when it takes over San Francisco after the Bay Bridge and Oakland subway line are blown up by Al Qaeda. It is an exciting book for teenagers and entertaining even to jaded reactionaries like me. I read it with pleasure, suffused with annoyance. Politically is it total crap. Why? Because it fantasizes that the  principal threat to a free society is coming from the national security apparatus, rather than Islam and domestic political correctness.

The world-view is perfectly left-progressive;  he quotes Thomas Jefferson on freedom and revolution, but ignores that he sent the Marines to the shores of Tripoli to bombard Islamic slavers. I think a lot of people think like Doctorow. A lot of people think the ACLU is actually defending your liberty, and that Human Rights Commissions in this country are actually defending human rights. As we have been made aware, Human Rights Commissions are busy suppressing human rights, and trying to jail our domestic Orwells.

Doctorow sets forth the case (in a charming tale, I admit) that the auto-immune system of the United States, Homeland Security, is out of control, and he shows how it might operate in a future where Al Qaeda has killed many thousands of people in massive sabotage. The issue is presented as the Bill of Rights versus anti-terrorist measures. Our hero quotes Jefferson’s  Declaration of Independence about the right of men to revolt against governments when they no longer secure our freedoms, and that is supposed to answer the issues completely.

There is never an honest debate among the characters about the real issue: the right balance between self-protection and the perceived outer threat. All the proponents of security are clearly  shown to be bad, stupid, fascists,  emotionally stunted, or speaking in southern accents. All the good people seem to be Democrats, multi-ethnic,  and cool, except for our hero, who appears to be impeccably WASP. The crux of the debate, which occurs in our hero’s civics class, never allows for a sophisticated or nuanced discussion.

Doctorow’s book is not meant to bear so heavy a burden. It is a well-written entertainment; and though I might buy it for a teenager, I would make sure to have a discussion with him later about the premises of its worldview.

Doctorow’s real defect is the failure to imagine that freedom’s enemies are to be found mostly these days on the political Left.

Did you ever try to get your dog to see something by pointing to it? Your dog just looks at your finger, because it has no capacity to grasp symbolic communication.

I think the political Left looks at the warnings about Islam and sees only the person pointing, making racialist and intolerant noises in public, without ever daring to imagine that the alarmist may have cause to be alarmed. For the left-progressive, the Other, the wildest shore of their imagination, is a Christian Republican schoolteacher who does not believe in Darwin. The range of conceivable alternatives is tiny, and Islam lies light-years outside of it. The notion that more people’s lives are being overturned and ruined by Human Rights Commissions than by Homeland Security, is beyond comprehension. That people are being tried by Human Rights Commissions for bad jokes,  that people are snitching on others for politically-incorrect comments, that Human Rights Commissions are subjecting authors and journalists to extensive inquiries into their writings, that free-speech on Canadian campuses is not being defended by police,  and is being assaulted by loud-mouth leftists, that Muslims are taking machetes to their campus opponents: all this and more makes Doctorow’s fantasies about the threat from Homeland Security to seem asinine.

As Orwell said, it takes a great deal of effort to see what is plainly  in front of our faces. Though Doctorow claims he has read 1984 thirty or forty times, he  has failed to see where the real threat is coming from.

Read this from our mutual hero, George Orwell, Mr. Doctorow:

“All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome. ”

“There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.”

“Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious”.

“So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.”

When the Climategate scandal erupted, do you recall that Google listed far fewer references to it than did Bing and other search engines?

The attached interview with Dan Reicher, chief of energy plans for Google, and a former Assistant Secretary for Energy in the US government, explains why.

“Turns out, the answer is technology. Reicher — a former Department of Energy assistant secretary who now directs Google’s investments in clean energy — believes that exposing the hidden costs of dirty fuels will set off a rush of investment in new energy innovations. He says carbon pricing is an “essential signal we have to get to.” Right now, “money is sitting there to make significant investments,” he says, but the cash flow is sidelined because the incentives aren’t there.”

Let us deconstruct carbon pricing. According to Google it is “the true price of carbon combustion.”

What is the true price? Clearly it is not the price you currenly pay. On the contrary, it is the price you would pay if Google and its minions manage to add all the taxes they think you should pay to deal with the effect of using fuels. Guess what they are? Taxes for global warming caused by using carbon-based fuels.

What global warming?

“As Reicher puts it, “putting a serious price of carbon will both get us closer to the serious energy reductions we need to make but also accelerate the domestic development and adoption of these technologies.” It’s that last part that’s good for business. When government holds up its side of the “triangle of technology, policy, and finance” that Reicher says is essential for green development, it spurs the private investment and innovation that keeps businesses strong.

That’s where Congress comes in. The most important policy is carbon pricing. That’s what will change the economic fundamentals, augmented by other programs — like energy efficiency standards and government revolving loans to bring new ideas to the market. The technology and finance sides are ready and able; but we’ve been waiting for too long for the policy piece that can complete the puzzle.

Google hopes the Senate will act quickly to jumpstart what it thinks will be an economic bright spot in the current downturn. Reicher doesn’t really care how it’s done, saying there are “various ways to get to a carbon price.” Whatever packaging it comes in, a price on carbon will ultimately be good for that company and many others.

British Information Commissioner forces the hand-over of tree-ring data to “arch-skeptic”, and part time climate analyst, Doug Keenan. Professor Mike Baillie claims the decision is a “staggering injustice”.

The article concludes:

Keenan, who admits he has no expertise in tree-ring analysis, says that whatever the data may or may not reveal, the university has no right to keep the data secret. The deputy information commissioner agrees.

The finding, combined with Smith’s earlier strictures against the University of East Anglia, could have widespread repercussions for academic research. Baillie calls the ruling “a direct, and unpleasant, off-shoot of the information revolution. It now appears that research data can be demanded, and indeed obtained, by anyone.”

Keenan, meanwhile, has upped the ante. Following the ruling, he this week asked the university to supply emails between Baillie and the head of the university’s centre for climate, environment and chronology, Paula Reimer over the past three years. He told the Guardian they could reveal a conspiracy to prevent him getting Baillie’s data. “The university has obviously not understood how things changed in the wake of climategate,” he said. “They still think they can act with impunity.”

Let us look at the facts:

1. Europe is being destroyed from within by elites who seek to replace its actual populations with a rabble of barbarian immigrants, with all the effects of crime, no-go zones, and imposition of the values of those barbarians on Europe.

2. The same process is happening in the United States, by uncontrolled illegal immigration of mestizo-Spanish central Americans.

3. The United States has been taken over by an affirmative-action President who neither understands the culture of the place nor its capitalist underpinnings, and who does not much like its white citizens.

4. A variety of laws and speech-control commissions have been empowered to suppress discussion of race, religion, and intelligence distribution on any terms other than the virtues of mulitculuralism, massive barbarian unqualified immigration, tolerance of Islam and the assumption of white guilt for all social evils.

Yes, this is one of those days when I think that western civilization is in a process of rapid and uncontrollable decay. I do not see anywhere, except on a few conservative blogs, any realization of how bad it is and how rapidly it is getting worse.

I do not see any political leadership, or serious political movements, anywhere in the West, daring to take on the assumptions that are driving us over a cliff, namely:

1. The equality of all cultures

2. the equality of all races (in terms of intelligence and achievement)

nor do I see any challenge being mounted to

3. The apparent desire to diminish, demean and or replace the white race with something else wherever it is currently dominant, if that is the appropriate word, or hanging on, if you prefer

or defence of

4.The superiority of of our constitutional order.

Do you?

That didn’t take very long!

April 8th, 2010.  Goldman Sachs calls for more financial regulation

April 16th, 2010.  Goldman Sachs accused of fraud by US regulator SEC

There is likely lot more to come as Obama walks the talk.

Is there anything Obama can’t do?  The whole article is worth reading.

While that experience was seismic, it doesn’t compare to my sea change upon Obama’s ascension.  One minute I was a leftist, despising this country and all it stood for.

And then, abruptly and astonishingly, I became a conservative.

The Ottawa Citizen this morning portentiously announced that women have “grabbed power” in the federal public service. Nothing of the sort has happened. They have been handed it on the silver platter of preferential hiring and promotion. Men have been excluded from increasing amounts of  the hiring for 25 years. Starting with Trudeau’s establishment in 1976 of a secretariat in the Privy Council Office on the status of women, bureaucratic power for women rapidly morphed (metastasized?) into equivalent bureaux everywhere throughout the bureaucracy to promote women. Once you establish some point of responsibility in the central agencies, then corresponding units have to spring up throughout government to respond. They all write reports to one another to show progress in hiring females. Hiring males bad, hiring women evidence of progress and enlightenment. Thus the inevitable results: year after year, white males are discouraged from applying. This is not rocket-science. If you established quotas for any conceivable group, and gave it powerful political backing, the same results would be achieved in twenty years. Whether the institution would be better off is a question left unasked.

The article says:

“In Ottawa, 12 of 29 deputy ministers are women. In the private sector, among FP 500 companies, 18 chief executive officers are women.”

About ten years ago I walked through an entire floor of Treasury Board secretariat, about a half-acre of cubicles, and did not see one male. Not one. I knew then that the public service had become irrelevant.

Year in and year out, talented males left the public service to become consultants to it, or lobbyists of it. They could earn the income without the manifold hassles of being inside the service.

The article again:

“Linda Duxbury, professor at Carleton University’s Sprott School of Business, questions whether  it is time to re-examine why women, who have 55 per cent of federal jobs, are still protected and given preferential treatment under Canada’s employment equity law, along with visible minorities, aboriginals and disabled.”

And then we are treated to the usual anti-male crap that goes unnoticed because anti-male crap is the new orthodoxy:

“Lorraine Dyke, director of the Sprott’s Centre for Research and Education on Women and Work, says history bears this out. Occupations that shift from being male to female-dominated are perceived as less important, less valued, and pay less. This downgrading in pay and status has happened with professions such as teachers and family physicians.

Still, Dyke believes a key reason the public service is attracting women is that the government runs a much more rigorous and objective hiring process than the private sector, which rids competitions from bias and ensures qualified women get an equal shot.

Absolute rubbish! As anyone with the vaguest conception of government hiring knows, extra points are scored for hiring women and designated minority groups. Nothing complicated about that. Pressure is applied from on top throughout the system to produce more women hirees. Obediently, the managers do so.

She says research has shown that women are drawn to the public sector and work that “makes a difference” and feel successful if they think they are making a difference.

Generally, women are more collegial and collaborative in the way they manage compared to men who are more directive, a leadership style considered more effective in the public and not-for-profit sectors.

Men are typically driven by work in which they have influence in shaping the direction of a company or organization. That’s a big drawback for the public service, where even the most senior bureaucrats are subject to the influence of their political masters who make the decisions and tell them what to do.

Let us phrase it another way, shall we?  Women, being as a sex more compliant (agreeable) and less achievement oriented than men, find more rewarding the atmosphere of the civil service, which rewards academic credentialism, routine, conformty and social skills, but which fears entrepreneurialism, strong personalities, and the possibility of real accountability for demonstrable achievement.  That is reserved for people at the top. In the feminine environment of the civil service, everyone is vying for the gold stars of compliant obedience to Big Sister. While unfair, this caricature is not untrue, and does as much justice to the facts as the self-serving blather of Mrs Dyke.

If you want more men in the civil service, you have to value the specifically male virtues, or stop stigmatizing them.

Your correspondent has previously posted several times with the title “This too shall pass”, where Obama backtracks on his previous commitment or policy.  Well it seems that he has done it again and this time with a policy much more significant.  Few days ago we were told this about Obama’s new nuclear policy.

In the Review, the US government will pledge to refrain from using nuclear weapons to attack any country in compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)  — even if that country has attacked the US with chemical or biological weapons.

Today we get this.

“We were concerned about the biological weapons,” Gates said, “and that’s why the president was very clear … if we see states developing biological weapons that we begin to think endanger us or create serious concerns, that he reserves the right to revise this policy.”

Clinton added, “If we can prove that a biological attack originated in a country that attacked us, then all bets are off.”

Gates also pointed out that the policy dictates that any country that uses chemical or biological weapons against the U.S. will “suffer a devastating conventional retaliation.”

Can we take anything seriously from this administration?  This is getting to be totally absurd.  It takes them only a few days to backtrack from their statement.  Does this administration give any serious thought when a policy is implemented?  Why do they consistently backtrack?  Perhaps this is the best explanation.

A new report circulating in the Kremlin today authored by France’s Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE) and recently “obtained” by the FSB shockingly quotes French President Nicolas Sarkozy as stating that President Barack Obama is “a  dangerous[ly] aliéné”, which translates into his, Obama, being a “mad lunatic”, or in the American vernacular, “insane”.

Why do we live in Canada? Canada is Huron for “post-glacial scrape”. It is cold three-quarters of the time. If your woodpile is gone by the end of March, you still have all of April and a good deal of May left in which to heat your house. Yes I know that the thaw begins in earnest most years in early April. This year it began in mid-March. Whoopee-doo! It is so close to an ice age here,  every month of the year except June, July, August, and September, and even in September you have the stove on some nights to keep the cabin warm.

I sat outside tonight smoking a cigar, which I recommend as a contemplative activity, seated on my deck, in the lee of my cabin.  I watched pine trees sway 15 degrees off-centre in a relentless ongoing blast of cold wind. The temperature, which had attained a freakish 30 degrees centigrade last weekend,  seven days ago (not seen since 1966), was officially 8 degrees tonight. I sat outside in a thick sweater, a windbreaker over it, with a toque (wool hat to Yanks) and gloves, wondering how any creature could live tonight. Every bird must be huddled in the woods, and any mammal must be in a burrow or a barn.

I once hear a Sudanese taxi driver describe what it was like to go home. Everyone slept outdoors on cots in the hot season (11 months of the year, I suppose), so that everyone was rather like in summer camp: the night was filled with the sound of people chatting amiably into the late hours. The night was a social and hospitable time.  Nor does the house in a hot climate  function  as it does in Canada. Here, one’s house is a heat conservation device. There, one’s house is a place to store property, or fend of an attack.  The kitchen is separated so that the house does not absorb the heat of cooking. Too hot inside? Take your bed out into the starry night, where everyone else is out on their cots  talking in low voices.

As the wind blasted outside tonight, I thought of the Dominican Republic, where we were a month ago.  There, you stick a cut wooden pole into the ground, and half the time it sprouts roots and turns into a tree.  And our trees! The weather invited them to sprout leaves last week, as if this place were the Dominican Republic. But the trees were too wise. They are programmed not to be deceived by warmth coming too early on the season, possibly because they work according to the warmth of the earth, not the sun.

And colour! Here every colour is found on a camouflage suit: grey-brown, grey, dark green, reddish-brown, and maybe black.  The northern eye longs for the yellows, blues, oranges and reds of flowers, and gets them for four months a year.

It seems I am always cutting wood, splitting, stacking and drying it for two years, so that when it meets its destiny in a cast-iron stove , it will burn well. So that, when I come in from the cold, I feel the palpable warmth of the cabin, and know that, though I live in an oven for three-quarters of the year, it is a safe place, where we can comfortably endure the dreadful climate we live in. Where the glass of wine is on the table, and great music on the horn.

I know this is no more than the adapted northen mind speaking, but life in the Canadian house-oven is quite comfortable. It has to be so. Everyplace else in post-glacial scrape is miserable. If you don’t believe me, just stand outside tonight in the wind.