Barrel Strength

Unleash your inner geek, Prime Minister!

O QanaDa, juHqo’maj je vav saq.
Batlh je rewbe’, qod Hoch roghvaH ra’.
tiDu’ wew Hot’bey, legh HoS je tlhab.
Da ‘u’, O QanaDa, pe’av Hochlogh.

joH’a’ jegh juHqo’ yay je tlhab.
O QanaDa, pe’av Hochlogh.
O QanaDa, pe’av Hochlogh.

And the translation:

O Canada, our home world and fatherland,
Honour and love in all its people command.
Our hearts glowing, we see strength and freedom.
Throughout the universe, O Canada, we will stand guard for all time.

God give our home world victory and freedom.
O Canada, we will stand guard for all time,
O Canada, we will stand guard for all time.

Changing the lyrics to the national anthem? Surely this is a mind-fuck! But whose minds? I notice the Tory blogosphere is responding with the same tentative feeling I have: have they gone mad? Is the spirit of Sheila Copps guiding our Fearless Leader? It is rather as if Stephen Harper has expressed a taste for rubber bondage fantasies in Chatelaine magazine. So out of character!

Or is this a precursor to the restoration to acceptance of “The Maple Leaf Forever”?

We suspect everything except the government having an outburst of political correctness. Say it isn’t so, Stephen!

I think it is a distraction, but from what?

See what Ignatieff has to say about abortion in this clip from his press conference:

Fanaticism is shouted out by Cabinet ministers and policy choices continue to be made for purely political reasons, despite the collapsing “science”  of man-caused global warming. The zombie stumbles on.

 
Britain’s Climate Change Minister, Ed Miliband, declares war on climate change skeptics.

“Mistakes and attempts to hide contradictory data had to be seen in the light of the thousands of pages of evidence in the IPCC’s four-volume report in 2007, said Miliband. The most recent accusation about the panel’s work is that its chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, may have known before the Copenhagen summit that its assessment report had seriously exaggerated the rate of melting of the Himalayan glaciers.

“However, Miliband was adamant that the IPCC was on the right track. “It’s worth saying that no doubt when the next report comes out it will suggest there have been areas where things have been happening more dramatically than the 2007 report implied,” he said.”

“The danger of climate scepticism was that it would undermine public support for unpopular decisions needed to curb carbon emissions, including the likelihood of higher energy bills for households, and issues such as the visual impact of wind turbines, said Miliband, who is also energy secretary.

Yep, I guess it would.

Worse, in a way, is Canada’s Jim Prentice saying Canada will reduce its CO2 emissions by 17%.

 ”Canada has formally notified the United Nations that it has embraced the Copenhagen Accord and will cut its carbon emissions by 17 per cent by 2020 from 2005 levels.

Federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice says it was the federal government’s plan all along to align its position with that of the United States.

Prentice has said that the first step towards a binding international treaty on climate change is for countries to outline their own emission-reduction targets before the UN’s official deadline of Jan. 31.

He says that although reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 17 per cent will be challenging, he believes it is attainable.”

 In the case of Prentice, does he believe a word he is saying? Or is he just talking for the microphones?

Bill Gross of PIMCO is well known for talking up things that would most benefit his bond funds but this chart is too interesting to pass up.

The most interesting data point in this graph is Japan.  A country with declining demographics and a significant outstanding debt.  With no way to get out of mountain of debt it is safe to say that Japan as nation is in deep peril.  The problems of Greece are well known, along with their inability to do anything about it, which brings us to Canada.

If that graph had been done in the ’90s, Canada would have been a proud member of the “Rings of Fire” club.  What changed?  Starting in the early 90s the size of the Canadian government diminished and that was made possible by majority government under Liberals, which did not have to engage in negotiations with the opposition parties to implement their agenda.  This is instructive because of the problems US will face, when trying to tackle their debt.    California gives us insight into how problem will unfold at the federal level in US.  Specifically the inability to reach an agreement on budget, which Canada was able to avoid due to its parliamentary structure.  Can anybody in US say Second Republic?

Bill Gross goes on to paint a grim picture of UK, which your correspondent cannot disagree with.

2009 has been considered a bad year for many; for me it was a year of triumphs. The forces of evil have been turned back internationally and domestically on two decisive fronts: free speech, vigorous nationalism, and climate change.

Free speech

The campaign waged by Ezra Levant in Canada against the speech control fanatics at Human Rights Commissions has been successful. The blogosphere rose in defence of Ezra but he made it work, by patiently devoting himself to de-legitiizing them. Later, the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench joined in the de-legitimization by roundly castigating the idiotic decision of Lori Andreachuk, the Alberta Human Rights Commissioner in the Stephen Boisson case.

Vigorous Nationalism

The nationalist cultural policy first came to light in the Herouxville Declaration, a statement made in 2007 by a small Quebec town’s aldermen and mayor that this is a Christian country, we eat pigs and we don’t treat our women like slaves. If you read it, you will find it surprizingly liberal in tone, but it appeared at a time when it was considered dangerous and provocative to herald Canadian social values, so uptight had everyone become with Muslim cultural intimidation.

Read the rest…

While fusspot Grit MP Dr.™ Carolyn Bennett yearns to get the government into the regulation of sex toys, entrepreneurs figure out how to go sustainable sexily in the free market.

In a rambling rank admission of the growing political endurance of Stephen Harper, ageing typist Lawrence Martin fails to answer a critical question: what is Lawrence Martin’s “safe word”?

Please, Lord, defend us from our judiciary. Not because they are soft on crime, but for what motivates them to be soft on crime, which they attribute to “poverty”. The “roots of poverty” are a whole lot deeper than anything that can be fixed up by prison or social work. Only moral reformation can fix poverty. Blaming Canadian society, or white people, or whoever else is running North America, is a popular escape from the realities of the situation, not an insight into it. The real root of Indian poverty is the welfare state, which dissolves moral responsibility, ties to community, self-worth, and the family.

As Theodore Dalrymple observed:

“Poverty has been redefined in industrial countries, so that anyone at the lower end of the income distribution is poor ex officio, as it were—poor by virtue of having less than the rich. And of course by this logic, the only way of eliminating poverty is by an egalitarian redistribution of wealth—even if the society as a whole were to become poorer as a result.”

Ontario judge pushes back against trend toward stiffer sentences

Read the rest…

With the revelations of scientific fraud in the AGW debate, I await the emergence of our next Senator McCarthy. Who was a party to this conspiracy? Who is covering up for them? How many warmists have been inflitrated into government? What is their relationship to Maurice Strong? Who authored the Copenhagen Treaty and why are they still in government?

Why is the Gaiain religion Leftist?

Let’s start with Leftism. I posit that there is such a thing as Leftism, which is a permanent feature of the human species. It basically says a large No to reality. Reality is wrong and needs to be fixed. Here is a set of its characteristics:

• The world is wrong at some fudamental level.
• The world is rationally knowable.
• Our party has that knowledge.
• That knowledge is perfect.
• Armed with perfect knowledge, we can remake the world.
• Since our knowledge is true and perfect, those who oppose us must in principle be ignorant, or in bad faith.
• The only thng standing in the way of remaking the world into the place it ought to be is the ignorance and bad faith of those who do not know.
• We are entitled to seize power and remake the world in the name of this knowledge.

Compare this to the Gaian religion/ideology:

• man is poisoning the planet with carbn dioxide, and if nothing is done, we will destroy ourselves with the by-products of fossil fuel consumption.
• Our science is unassailable.
• We can re-engineer the world production systems through treaties requiring new production methods to reduce carbon footprints, as well as wealth transfers  engendered by those transfers.
• Those who oppose us are ignorant or deniers.
• The only thi
• We are entitled to seize power and remake the world in the name of this knowledge: viz. the Copenhagen Treaty.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

This is as stylized as kabuki and as predictable as left-wing lunacy.  The Citizen and Canwest don’t want to get caught off-base on this Climategate thing, so they test the waters with David Warren.  If the sky does not fall, then perhaps in a few days John Robson might mention it.  At the Globe, it will almost certainly be their house contrarian Margaret Wente who touches the story first – and maybe last.  Don’t misunderstand. These writers are not being used to legitimize or validate these stories, they are used to signify that the newspaper is aware of them but does not consider them newsworthy. The Citizen and the Globe want to make it clear that they noticed strange people saying strange things. That’s all. That is why they use their in-house ‘writers on strange topics’ – to ensure that the publications are broadcasting their distaste, their distrust and their distance from the topics they are writing about.  As for the CBC? Forget the CBC.

It is slowly grinding the Liberals under. Personally, there is a part of me that thinks they deserve to sit on the sidelines for a couple of generations while we, the rest of us, take back the country from their Volvo-driving hands.

John Ivison – Liberals Can’t Stop a Slide to Tory Majority

Steve Janke – The Game Changes, but the Liberals are Still not Playing

Stephen Chase and Daniel Leblanc – With Quebec Win, Tories Edge closer to a Majority

It is clear the two important constituencies are beginning to see the virtue of the Conservatives: French-Canadians outside Montreal, and English Canadians in the suburbs of Toronto and the cities of Ontario, like London. These voters are not natural Conservatives; they are going with whom they think will be the winner.

I was riding in the back seat of a taxi, about a decade ago. The driver was a Lebanese Christian. We saw some girls walking along the street, looking quite attractive, as young women tend to be. We were talking about Muslim immigration, the Lebanese civil war, how things were different in Canada. Considering his Muslim countrymen now in Canada, and the girls looking attractive, he said: “This society will drive them crazy. Everything about it. Especially the freedom of women.”

The head of Ottawa’s taxi union, a Muslim man, was sentenced to a year in jail for criminal harassment of his daughter.

It is pleasing to see the Court’s condemnation made no allowance for his Islamic cultural-religious belief system about women. The article by Andrew Seymour reads:

“Ontario Superior Court Justice Lynn Ratushny said the jail sentence was the minimum penalty that Yusef Al Mezel could serve to address the “strong need” for denunciation and general deterrence after he implied that the actions of his 23-year-old daughter would be met with violence because she had shamed and dishonoured her family.

“While the judge recognized Al-Mezel was a respected community leader whose threats would not likely result in an honour killing, she said they do remain as threats of some possible form of violence in the name of honour that required significant condemnation.

“They invoke a seriously dangerous belief system that can and has led to violence against women,” Judge Ratushny said. ”

Hurrah! “A seriously dangerous belief system” indeed.

The article continues:

“In the message, he also wrote of “the Sharaf of the family,” which Eman Al-Mezel later explained to police was the belief that she had shamed and dishonoured her family because she had run away from home and shed her hijab and Muslim beliefs.”

Is this the one place where western society will not invoke multi-culti rationalizations for bad behaviour, the status of women? It seems to be an excellent hill on which to stand. It rounds up both men and women in defence of commonly-held culture against the attacks of the barbarians. It invokes neither Deity nor denomination. It says: this is the way we do things here. , Obviously, some people just need to be told, and when they do not heed, to throw them in jail for a while to reflect upon the message.

Francophone education bureaucrats in New Brunswick have concluded somehow that the national anthem is unsuitable for students to sing:

“I think different people have different views, but I think globally people want us to promote Canadian values, and I think there’s nobody who would question that. Now, is the anthem the only key element? I think not, personally,” Mr. Mazerolle said. “I think there are other activities that we should promote, and let’s start a good discussion about what values as Canadians we really want to promote.”

You can help start the “discussion” by making your views known directly to this jackanape by emailing him at hermel.mazerolle@gnb.ca.

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George Jonas is Canada’s premier political intellectual. He is old and has a weak voice, so his speech (above) is being read by another. His distinctions between  ambitions and rights should be embedded in the mind of every responsible citizen. His battle with statism is never-ending.

His analysis is entirely consistent with that of Brian Lee Crowley’s Fearful Symmetry: The Fall and Rise of Canada’s Founding Values. I suspect that Crowley may offer a more hopeful view of the future.