Barrel Strength

While we are on the topic of socialism in Canada, imagine a society without public transport.

You think, like a good Canadian, that such a thing is a disaster, right? Wrong, wrong ,wrong.

Go to the Dominican Republic. You cannot walk along a country road for a hundred yards without a jeep, jitney, motorized tricycle, motorbike, or taxi offering you transport. Wait half an hour and a country bus will take you to town. No public transport. No unionized workers. Few if any fixed routes, except for inter-city travel. Everything is coordinated by cell phones. The poor get around quite well, as there is transport for every budget. Air-conditioned taxi for the rich. A plywood bench in a Toyota pick-up truck for the poor. The rear seat of a motorcycle for anyone.

Imagine what “public” transport would be like in Ottawa if there were no public sector providing it.   The first effect would be a vast reduction in large buses, driving around at all hours of day and night, mostly empty. Have you ever thought how soviet that is, that tons of moving vehicle are used to transport two, three, or six people, all the while chewing up diesel fuel, by a unionized worker approaching a meltdown of rage? I invite you to look at large near-empty buses at any hour of day as a symptom of socialist planning, not market failure.

In a capitalist transport system, vehicles would be appropriately sized to the human traffic. Very few buses would be the full-sized monsters of main traffic routes.     Jitneys, car-pools, taxis, and mini-buses would pick people up from suburban homes and take them to assembly points, where large air-conditioned coaches would take them to downtown offices.

The system would be coordinated by cell-phones between drivers, by some measure of common ownership of vehicles, and by computers.     Vertical integration between the smallest providers and the largest, and horizontal integration across the cities of Ottawa and Gatineau, would probably be impossible. Only government licensing would create the shortages that would result in higher fares. So don’t restrict the number of licences in the transport businesses, just licence the drivers in the same way that all people are.

Such a system would be near impossible to monopolize. Free entry and exit.

Instead, what do we have? Legal monopolies on transport, held by city councils. Large labour unions. The public held hostage to sullen unionized drivers. Overcrowded buses. Poor service.

Why should you not be able to phone a jitney cruising your section of suburbia for a lift to the nearest mall or shopping strip, where you would transfer to a smaller bus, and then to a larger coach if you were going more than ten miles. This would be the normal pattern of public transport if it were privatized. It is time to unleash the Lebanese, the Sikhs and like entrepreneurial clans and nations and let them solve the problem of coordination.  OC Transpo is just a socialist planner. Abolish it.

Don’t hold your breath.

An article by Randall Denley in the Ottawa Citizen reminds me of many things wrong with the current practice of medicine in Canada, which derive essentially, from a complete lack of computerization, and the coordination of services in time that computerization allows. Deeper still, it reflects the incentives of a socialist system of resource allocation, where rationing must occur by time, rather than by money.

His article was entitled “Ontario patients’ time is infinite, and worth nothing”. It related the fact that line-ups are used to ration medical attention for everything and anything. It is the soviet face of Canadian medicare. The patient’s time is worth nothing.

The failure to keep up with the business methods of even 15 years ago is more and more apparent. If the motor vehicle bureaus of  this country ran on the same paper-based record system, governments would have lost elections for the failure to modernize. Why does medicine get a free pass?

My own doctor is completely uncomputerized. This means that:

1) appointments can only be made by telephone. Lose the paper recording your appointment, write it down in the wrong place, call at the wrong time, and the appointment cannot be made or is lost.

2) reminders, if any, are by telephone, wasting the secretaries’ time and mine.

3) if my medical records are kept anywhere, they are on manuscript pages, or on  printed pages of  paper recording the results of medical tests .

4) results of medical tests are not available to me, in at least two ways. They are on paper, which makes copying more expensive than it needs to be. But, worse, I do not have a right them, it would seem. They appear to be property of the physician, rather than of the patient. Consequently, on the basis of records I have not seen, my physician might feel authorized to call for  dietary changes  (say). The validity of his advice cannot be tested against any other norms, opinions, or medical standards  unless I have the relevant information. All I have is his word for it. If I write down the test scores, say blood pressure and cholesterol, I had better bring a pen and paper. If I refer my case to another opinion, I suppose a physical transfer of paper files must occur, at further waste of time and money.

5) My doctor’s office has no way of taking money, except in cash.  The first thing that would be done in a capitalist doctor’s office, which you know from visiting your dentist, is to install credit and debit card machines.

Occasionally it takes foreign travel to make one realize what a backwater this country can be. Just as Cuba has gradually gone to ruin, the gentle pace of falling behind is imperceptible until some event forces one’s attention to our obsolescence. Even my lawyer will send me documents by email.  My doctor does not have a computer. Just think about that for a moment.

Moreover, why are there waiting rooms? Because waiting is a way of queuing for service, which is a way of imposing a user fee. It is rationing by way of wasting the customer’s time rather than by price.

Imagine medicine without waiting rooms.

That is medicine on a properly business-like basis.

My point from the other day about the gap in time between when the global warming scam was exposed, and the ongoing drivel of electoral politics, is illustrated by a comment by the Liberal energy critic in a House of Commons natural resources committee yesterday:

Liberal natural resources critic David McGuinty on Tuesday highlighted Redford’s call for a national energy strategy, saying she’s raising some important questions about where the country is headed on energy development.

However, what has been absent from the discussion so far, is how greenhouse gas reductions will be factored into any pan-Canadian approach, he said.

“Is it possible that we would have a national energy policy or strategy, without addressing greenhouse gases?” McGuinty told the Tory-dominated House of Commons natural resources committee.”

Of course,  any energy policy focussed on greenhouse gases would not be an energy policy, it would be a policy predicated on a superstition, like a witchcraft policy, or obsolete scientific conceptions, like phlogiston. What is the federal government doing about phlogiston? Nothing. It does not exist.

And for those who may be unaware, the Liberal energy critic in the federal parliament is the brother of the Ontario Premier in the provincial legislature, the one who is pursuing a disastrous policy of windmill generation, shutting down coal plants,  and higher prices for consumers.

I have to keep reminding myself of Duggan’s Dew’s comment: “Dalwhinnie! 100 is the average IQ, not the bottom!”.

The anthropogenic global warming fraud is the subject of today’s commentary.

The issue for me is the time gap between the first real evidence the thing was a fraud, and the abandonment of policies in places like Ontario that were predicated on a global warming that is not happening, and if happening, not caused by man’s CO2 emissions.

I cite, for example, the comment by Falsum to the blog posting Inconvenient Facts posted yesterday. The report by scientists appeared in the Daily Mail. Falsum wrote:

The Daily Mail? Seriously? That newspaper has slightly less credibility than the average 14 year-old youtube commenter. The scientific community is agreed that global warming is real, that we are causing it, and that it will be catastrophic if we do not do anything.

Hack journalism does nothing to change that. Try again when you find an article in a reputable peer-reviewed journal.

 What the  article said – which evidently Falsum did not bother to read, was that the British Met Office had realeased the data. The first paragraphs were:

The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.

The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.

Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.

The East Anglia Climate Research Unit is the source of the Climategate email hacking scandal.

In Falsum we find the complete believer, confident that the science is on his side, and not afraid to say so. The last time he thought through the issue must have been four or five years ago, because he has missed everything since.

 What has fascinated me is the several-year-long gap between the first publication of the emails that showed the whole thing was a vicious academic game played for keeps (Climategate 1, in 2009), and the spread of this realization slowly slowly through the intelligentsia until now.

Consider Ontario for example, where the provincial government has been pursuing a policy spending billions on wind farms and coal plant shutdowns, paid for by large increases in electricity rates. The opposition leader Tim Hudak dare not attack the theory behind Premier McGuinty’s folly because to do so would offend the state of believed ignorance in the Ontario media.

Wikipedia entries on the subject of Climategate are fully controlled by warmists to this day.

Climategate 1 occurred in 2009. It exposed all the doubts and lack of facts of the perpetrators of the carboin myth for all to see. A cascade of toothless inquiries since, led by warmists,  has exonerated the perpetrators.

 Yet anyone with a few hours of time on their hands and the inclination to read into a subject can find convenient summaries of the emails in question.

We are in the presence of a believed mythology. Man bad. Gaia good. Spaceship earth being plundered and ravaged by insensitive male boors. Imminent doom from CO2 emissions. Redemption through atonement to Gaia.

It took many decades for communism to be exposed.

Capitalism bad. Capitalists evil. Working man good. All power to the working man through the revolutionary appartus of the Party. The Party knows the outcome of history, and it must temporarily assume dictatorial powers, but only until the work of socialism is complete, when we shall all be free and equal and living in a man-created paradise.

Communism had the advantage of a huge captive state, a ruthless regime of terror and victory in WW2. It was a vastly successful ideology that held a third of the world in thrall to a primitive Gnostic superstition. It lingers in North Korea, which is a theme park of xenophobic failure and starvation.

By contrast the climate thing has all the features of leftism without the bother of Marxist economic claptrap. The climate thing carries on with its own regime of intimidation inside universities, hysteria in the media, mathematical modeling that is fact-free and cannot even predict the past, and government subsidies. Its influence today vies with communism in the 1930s. Will it die soon, or will it take another few decades for most average informed people to realize it was a scam?

 And will it die suddenly, or just peter out?

 That the whole warmist fantasy will fail is not in doubt. But the average person of good conscience has neither the time nor the motivation to inquire too deeply into it, and so drastically mistaken measures are undertaken in all western economies by fools like McGuinty on  behalf of Gaianism, the latest Gnostic outbreak.

We can only hope that the learning cycle will be faster and less murderous this time with Gaianism than it was with communism.

From today’s Ottawa Citizen:

Men, argues McGill University professor Paul Nathanson and his colleague Katherine Young, suffer from the myth that they are the gender with the power and therefore cannot be damaged by criticism and ridicule. The physical, political and economic power that a small percentage of men do wield renders women, they believe, “either unwilling or unable to see men as fully human beings, people who can indeed be hurt, both individually and collectively.”

Nathanson and Young have written five books chronicling the rise of misandry, the hatred of men, which they view as a culture war being fought because of the feminist activism that led to the changed role of men.

Like a lot of people these days, I support and have supported the Conservatives in their efforts to get control of the country wrested away from the Liberals. Am I a conservative? Frankly, it is not a question I much bother with. Other people find me conservative, but if someone told me I was a moderate liberal, I might accept the term, depending on what they meant.

What I want is an end to the hysteria, Stalinism, group rights, suppression of free speech, oppression of the ordinary person, oppression of the gun-owner, oppression of the store-owner, oppression of the ordinary citizen of all races and colours against the depredations of the indigent, the mad, the over-privileged mascot groups of the Left, the police – yes, the police – the do-gooders, the thugs, the professional protest groups, and the damage done by the chattering classes who undermine society like termites.

This is why I read with some sympathy an article by Barry Rubin in Pajamas Media about the distinction between liberals, as he describes them, and the left.

“You shouldn’t have to be a conservative to be horrified by the contemporary situation. But while conservatives and Republican are going to lead the opposition to the status quo, they should seek to build a broad front rather than wage a campaign against historical liberals.”

Historical liberals include people like Teddy Roosevelt, in that definition.  When the situation required intervention, Teddy Roosevelt intervened.  Think of food and drug safety as one of his major contributions to the public weal.

I once read a book Radical Son, by the former marxist, David Horowitz, who was editor of Ramparts magazine in the 1960s and early 1970s. I recommend it as one of the great memoirs of former totalitarians, up there with Arthur Koestler, Whitaker Chambers and the other departing communists of the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Horowitz’ great observation is that, once he left the Left, he entered the land of freedom. There is just the Left: tight, hysterical, heresy-sniffing, unfree, and then there is all other political opinion, left, right and centre. Only once in the free air, outside the prison-camp of Leftism, did he find that people called “conservative” actually had vigorous disagreements with one another. And felt perfectly free to have them. Such is the nature of life in the free air. Let us keep it that way.

It is for this reason I hate, fear and despise what the Liberals tried to do to this country, that they tried to turn it into a leftist prison camp of controlled opinion, with the minds carefully masked by political correctness, which is just Leftism without the bother of Marxist central planning. So am I a conservative? or just a liberal?  I don’t know. But I am sure enjoying Harper putting a stake through their large-L Liberal hearts. Just to make sure.

CBC Radio One: A day’s listening:

Victims: which groups the CBC will cover in a given day in 2011

plight of the gays in the US military, the plight of gays generally, Canadian aboriginals, women generally, Arab protesters, as long as they are against tyrants, but not if they burn Christian churches

Icons: people you will hear from or about regularly

Jane Fonda, feminists generally, the Arab spring, Noam Chomsly, David Suzuki, Greenpeace, social activists, and protesters against capitalism, global warming, or income inequality

Issues: what concerns the CBC and its presumed listenership

The Occupy movement, income inequalities, capitalism, anthropogenic global warming, Conservative lack of compassion

What you do not hear about on CBC:

Victims: Christians in Islamic lands, men abused by women, the average taxpayer, people not employed because of anti-pipeline or anti-forestry movements

People you do not hear from or about on CBC

Icons: Warren Buffett, Conrad Black, George Jonas, David Warren, Mark Steyn, David Frum, and  a very long list of moderates, liberals, and people who think

Issues: issues not discussed by anyone on CBC

Impending collapse of the Eurozone, state bankruptcies from decades of chronic overspending, the implications of the unequal distribution of intelligence in the population generally and between ethnic groups,  biological differences generally, anything that contradicts alarm about global warming.

You can add you own topics that will not be covered, people who will not be heard, ideas that will not be discussed. I welcome your contributions. I am merely scratching the surface.

Also, remember that it is not really state radio because the CBC does not answer effectively either to the government or to the regulator. Nor does it answer to the market. It is public radio, a great whale cruising the ocean of taxpayer money, magnificent, unaccountable, inscrutable, self-directed, self-involved, self-absorbed, and rapidly heading for Captain Stephen Harper and the good ship Tory, armed with sonar and a whale-gun. Flensing cannot be long off. Ambergris, anyone?

Another piece of wondferful news. Charlotte Gray, thinks the GG is “The government’s secret weapon for restoring the power of the monarchy”. Or so she says in the Walrus, the refuge of the Liberal intelligentsia.

After I wiped the snot from my upper lip from reading that, I began to think: “Maybe this is the secret Harper plan we have all been waiting for”.

Says Charlotte:

In an extraordinary return to the Canada of yesteryear, the government is engineering a comeback for the monarchy. Johnston, consciously or not, has been recruited into the prime minister’s campaign to restore the symbols of an older, whiter Canada.

The article then follows with a history of the role of Governor General, and a quick tour of Johnson’s career  – law professor and university president – where Johnson proved successful in rising to the top of the greasiest poles, and raising five highly accomplished daughters. I do not know which accomplishment is more difficult, but he did both.

And now back to Charlotte’s political analysis.

This quiet relaunch of the monarchy forms part of a larger campaign, led by a group of fierce monarchists, including Harper’s principal secretary, Ray Novak; John Baird; and Chris Champion, senior adviser to immigration minister Jason Kenney. These men make no secret of their eagerness to erase the Liberal-dominated narrative of recent Canadian history, with its emphasis on the Charter, multiculturalism, and the flag, and replace it with other, older traditions that embrace military victories and historical identification with Britain. Canadian achievements of the past half century are being expunged: the word “peacekeeping,” the concept for which Liberal prime minister Lester B. Pearson won the Nobel Prize, is rarely mentioned in Ottawa; and Baird has even redesigned his business card so it no longer features the flag or the name of his department’s headquarters, the Lester B. Pearson Building.

The Tories’ determination to remake Canada to suit their own tastes may come as no surprise, given their virulent aversion for all things Liberal. Nevertheless, it is an odd campaign to pursue in a country where most citizens are not of British origin, and where the idea of Canada as a “warrior nation” can rankle immigrants who have fled wars. The renewed spotlight on the Queen particularly irritates some Quebecers. “Has the Harper government decided to make francophone citizens feel like strangers in their own country?” asks Lysiane Gagnon, Quebec columnist for the Globe and Mail.

So I phoned the PMO and got my old buddy Steve on the phone.

Me: “Prime Minister, is it your intention to restore the Canada of 1965? You know, the low tax, pre-medicare, sound public finances, pre-official bilingualism place it once was? You know, the place with the aircraft carrier and the large air force?”

PM: “Doubtless in the fullness of time you will come to appreciate the amplitude of the conservative take-back of the country, but for now I can say: ‘Just watch me’ “.

Me: “Have you decided to make French Canadians feel like strangers in their own country?”

PM: “They have their country, we have ours. If they want to join Canada, they’re welcome, same as every qualified immigrant.”

Me: “Thank you very much Prime Minister. So is Charlotte Gray right?”

PM: “Who is Charlotte Gray?”

Thus ended the conversation. I swear the Prime Minister will take phone calls from anonymous Tory bloggers, if you ask sweetly enough.

So I have to credit Charlotte Gray for this scoop on the government’s intentions to return us to the whiter Canada of yore, where a protestant male can hope to aspire to the highest position in the land. It gives hope to the rest of us, that we too may aspire to the nation’s highest offices, even if we suffer from melanin and estrogen deficiency. A dark plot indeed, Charlotte.

From time to time I enjoy reading blogs of guys who make me look like the tolerant liberal that I am. After all, a lot of what passes for conservatism is not really conservative in a deep sense; rather it is the cry for a return to common sense, and in doing so, we must reject the cultural Bolshevism and nihilism of the past  60 years. So that makes Barrelstrengthians look like dyed in the wool conservatives, because we oppose submission to Islam, affirmative action,  or anthropogenic global warming, whereas what we really are is sensible people who favour free trade, religious freedom, including especially the right to avow one’s faith in God and the Christian faith in a public place, individual responsibilty, lawful behaviour, and well-brought up children. The rest is discussable.

For these reasons we are considered conservative when what we really oppose is authoritarian leftism, based on group rights, a movement which has appropriated the word “liberal” in the United States and Canada, and is nothing of the sort.

For others of a particular religious or political clarity, such as David Warren, Barrelstrengthians would be found wanting in doctrinal rigor, and quite likely fatally infected with Enlightenment ideas, such as rationalism, progressivism, or deism. (I don’t think so but we stand on guard)

To our brethren of schools even more extreme conservative than us, we say: peace. We have no quarrel with you, though you, by rights, may find us wanting in faith, clarity, or political rigor. There remains so much aggressive anti-Christian, anti-male, anti-white political thought and agitation out there that I have no time for intra-mural vilification. Even within the Blogging Tories list, it is very difficult to have a frank argument about race, say, when one side of that debate (namely that it is real, politically and statistically significant, and that genetics matters) is declared by the ideological gatekeeper as cause for expulsion.

So if you would like to venture into the deeper realms of rejection of modernity, there are a few blogs by men whose rejection starts at the Reformation, or the Glorious Revolution of 1688, or the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and they are not kidding.

• Throne and Altar
• Stuff Black People Don’t Like
• View from the Right
• Steve Sailer 

Here are some examples of blogs taken to be conservative which are, in my view, simply dealing with matters from a liberal (meaning concerned with individual rights) commonsensical position. I am not intending to insult them for this reason. I agree with that perspective in many respects, and am not certain where I would disagree with it, or their authors.

• Steynonline
• Jihad Watch
• Vlad Tepes

In other words, you do not have to be a throne and altar conservative to oppose islamization or unsustainable public finances. You can simply say, as we do, that a great deal of what needs doing in modern North American society is to stop trying to engineer equality of outcomes, and to support reasonable limits on the power of the state to transform us in the name of silly nineteenth century ideas.

I would be interested in comments on the validity of this division among conservative blogs and in additions to the list of really out-there (but sane) conservative blogs. Which are your guilty pleasures?

What about the men? What about the damage to society caused by all the surplus involuntary bachelors?

In the commendable decision to rule that a law against polygamy (strictly speaking polygyny) did not constitute an offence to Charter rights, the large obvious fact was missed, at least  in any coverage I have seen. My point is that, given the anti-male bias of contemporary society, the harm to men is not perceived, and if perceived, not thought worthy of mention.

Mr. Justice Bauman discussed the damage in terms of reduced male parental investment in children, and hence lower survival rates for children, higher rates of violent crime (from surplus men), exploitation of women and violence in the household, and the “lost-boy” effect, when male children reckon that they will never have a woman to love, so they leave the community.

If all of the society is polygynous, then there is no community which surplus males can leave except by emigration to another country which forbids polygyny. Fat chance of that for the Muslim world, and the 100 million surplus males of China and India.

And what do you do with 50 million surplus males, such as China or India have? The answer is obvious. You go to war. You have an inbuilt incentive to spend your surplus males on warfare, brigandage, and wife-gathering. And how do you gather a wife? You kill her husband, and take her home. Iran got rid of a huge surplus of its male population in the Iran-Iraq war(1980-1988), spending them as wastefully as they could. Half a million battle deaths resulted from the use of World War 1 tactics in that ill-fought conflict.

Among Mr. Justice Bauman’s many findings, these three struck me as closest to the theme of this article:

[785]     The sex ratio imbalance inherent in polygyny means that young men are forced out of polygamous communities to sustain the ability of senior men to accumulate more wives. These young men and boys often receive limited education as a result, and must navigate their way outside their communities with few life skills and little social support.

[786]     Another significant harm to children is their exposure to, and potential internalization of, harmful gender stereotypes.

[787]     Polygyny has negative impacts on society flowing from the high fertility rates, large family size and poverty associated with the practice. It generates a class of largely poor, unmarried men who are statistically predisposed to violence and other anti-social behaviour. Polygyny also institutionalizes gender inequality. Patriarchal hierarchy and authoritarian control are common features of polygynous communities.

The damage is done by “the internalization of harmful gender stereotypes” is minuscule compared to the evident unfairness of polygyny to most males. Multiple wives mean sons without effective fathering, and produces  a surplus- unwanted collection of surplus males available for war, and crime, and disinclined for useful work. Osama bin Laden was the result of such an upbringing.

Such is the political correctness of our times, and its anti-male bias, that the principal harm of polygyny is mentioned briefly in the decision, and rates nothing in the media treatment of the question.

“Pope says Mass at Easter.” Most headlines are of this sort. They tell us that the world is still in the same place as it was yesterday.  Other examples: “Fresh trouble in the Arab world”. “Seas rising because of global warming!” “Weather worse because of global warming”. They join the 35 other global warming hysteria headlines this month. For forty years we heard of IRA bombings in Northern Ireland and England; it was news when it stopped.

But this week we read headlines which may be of fundamental importance. The second experiment has demonstrated that neutrinos have moved faster than light. If this proves to be true and not merely the artefact of the experiment or observational bias, then the foundations of physics have just taken a five megaton hit.

So what is staying the same this month?

Eurozone crisis - same, but worsening.

Islamic inability to behave democratically? – same, but the evidence keeps coming in, all of which is ignored in the MSM picture of the world.

[Man-caused] global warming hysteria – the nails keep being driven in to that coffin, but the zombie keeps escaping.

My apologies to readers – job pressures have kept me from blogging lately. Happy is the blogger with a day job.

The recent suit at one of the too many human rights commissions by a Turkish-Canadian woman complained that, as a racialized ethical vegan, she was the victim of discrimination, and that she was part of a racialized minority. What pray tell, is a “racialized” person?

You will hear more about racialized persons, because the word acts like a dumptruck, transporting a host of grievance-mongering from one site of public discourse to another, without the bother of thought. Sort of like the German High Command sending Lenin to Russia in a sealed train, to get the bacillus out of Geneva and into the prostrate body of Tsarist Russia, where it could really do some damage. (I digress)

Wikipedia says:

Racialization refers to processes of the discursive production of racial identities. It signifies the extension of dehumanizing and racial meanings to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group. Put simply, a group of people is seen as a “race”, when it was not before.

This led me to the fascinating entry by the University of Guelph on the subject, Understanding Racialization:

In the past, race was defined as a natural or biological division of the human species based on physical distinctions including skin colour and other bodily features. This notion of race emerged in the context of European domination of nations and peoples deemed non-white. It was used to establish a classification of peoples. Some of the greatest atrocities in human history have been associated with notions of racial superiority.

There is no legitimate scientific basis for racial classification. Genetic science now tells us that physical characteristics and genetic profiles correlate more strongly between “races” than among them. It is now recognized that notions of race are primarily centered on social processes that seek to construct differences among groups with the effect of marginalizing some in society.

While biological notions of race have been discredited, the social construction of race remains a potent force in society. The process of social construction of race is termed racialization.

I would say that these three paragraphs contain the essence of the leftist falsehoods that dominate public discourse.

Read the following and inform yourselves:

1. This notion of race emerged in the context of European domination of nations and peoples deemed non-white.

False. All people at all times have been conscious of racial differences, and “race” did not emerge in post-16th century Europeas an intellectual construct any more than height or weight did. Race, ethnicity, tribehood: each and all have been observed facts of life since before conscious thought, just as rabbits differ from hares, or both from deer. The intellectuals of Enlightenent Europe may have systematized the classifications, but they systematized classifications of everything: taxonomy and species collecting was the fashion of the time, viz. Linnaeus and the modern biological classification system.

The 4,000 year old pictographs of ancient Egypt show Africans and caucasians as recognizable races. The Romans pondered the origin of races as they looked upon the red-haired Scythians and the Negroid Nubians, and considered the origin of races as related to available sunlight in their native lands.

2. There is no legitimate scientific basis for racial classification.

False. Humans have evolved. (Darwin is apparently a new idea in some quarters). They are evolving still, at an accelerating rate. Races emerged as Africans left the African continent and colonized the rest of the world in a process starting about 50,000 years ago, settling areas where neanderthals had been before them.

• The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey, by Spencer Wells
• Race: The Reality of Human Differences, by Vincent Sarich and Frank Miele
• Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors, by Nicholas Wade
• The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending
• Race, Evolution and Behavior: A Life History Perspective, by Philippe Rushton

Racial differences are real, genetic, unfolding in time, and evidenced by both organic processes and statistically-validated behavioral differences. I noted that the list of books above range in political acceptability from The Journey of Man, which has a PBS television series attached to it, to Philippe Rushton’s, which you can only get from non-Amazon booksellers. But they all say the same thing in different ways.

All humans who left Africa in ancient times are the products of adaptation to new environments, and various genetic compromizes have occurred over time to allow us to live in Asia, Polynesia, Europe, and the Americas.

3. Genetic science now tells us that physical characteristics and genetic profiles correlate more strongly between “races” than among them.

False. Stephen Jay Gould’s Marxist beliefs led him to to emphasize the commonlaity of our species-hood over the fuzzy distinctions of race. He has been debunked elsewhere. See readings above, but more particularly, see Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution, for the more general attack on Gould’s bioogical ideas.

4. While biological notions of race have been discredited, the social construction of race remains a potent force in society

“The social construction of race”. Of all the untruths taught in universities, perhaps none is more pernicious for the long-term than the denial of the biological. It has the effect of placing racial tolerance on the false premise that there are no races. Since there are no races, in this view, race is a social construct. Hence “racialized ethical vegans” can become a race – a category of people able to suffer “racialization.” You do not have to be a race to suffer discrimination. People will and do discriminate about anything, frequently for the benefit of human society. (e.g. the fridge is filthy- clean it. Pick up your mess. Get a job. Change the oil in your car) Trillions of discriminations keep civilization working.

Understand this: tolerance has no meaning or moral worth if there are not real differences to be tolerated. Toleration is a political bargain to make society livable without the need for an established religion.

It has been proven – study shows – that the brains of conservatives are more resistant to change and novelty than those of liberals, or so says Chris Mooney.

“There’s a reason Winston Churchill was a better wartime leader than Neville Chamberlain. There’s a reason why the Tea Party got itself elected in under two years, while Occupy Wall Street is kinda all over the place. There’s a reason why we have scores of environmental groups that often can’t see eye to eye. There’s a reason, as George Lakoff and others have noted, why Democrats (and scientists!) focus too much on policy facts and details rather than winning over people’s hearts (and winning elections).

“But when it comes to determining what’s true about complex, technical subjects—issues full of ambiguity and uncertainty, where you can’t just jump to conclusions and have to stay open-minded and tentative in your beliefs—I’ll take the scientific-liberal approach any day. And after reading the book, I think so will you.”

The “scientific-liberal” approach? Methinks something huge is being assumed here, that the scientific method is fully consistent with liberal political values, in the American sense of the word “liberal”.

As Geoffrey Miller wrote in his book Spent (worth a read), people have been found to differ along six different axes. These results are robust, and represent what psychological testing has been able to show in its century-long development.

One of the axes of difference is openness. It is generally true that people who identify with conservative positions will be less open to novelty than people who identify with left-wing positions. Likewise, conservatives will generally be found to be more sociable, or agreeable, than liberals (in the American sense of that term). Thus conservative people generally place a higher value of manners, and less on autheticity, than the expressive individualist.

The full range of differences is given by the mnemonic gocase:

• g for general intelligence
• o for openness
• c for conscientiousness
• a for agreeability
• s for stability
• e for extraversion

Each of this characteristics is fully independent of the other. A person can be thoroughly open, say, and highly disagreeable; highly conscientious, but psychologically unstable. For example, I am rather more open than closed to new ideas and hence should be a liberal, but score lower on the agreeability scale, so I don’t particularly want to keep quiet at the dinner party regarding say, the usefulness of Canada’s gun registration. So I can come across as an argumentative conservative while passing the joint, so to speak.

And you have your own balance of quirks that makes you who you are. It may well be that people who are conservative react more emotionally than people who call themselves liberals, and “liberals” (a most misleading term) may have greater capacity for dealing with ambiguous information. This is the thrust of one of Mooney’s guest columnists, Andrea Kuszewski.

“So—for liberals to make a case for an idea or cause, they come armed with data, research studies, and experts. They are convinced of an idea if all the data checks out–basically they assign meaning and value to ideas that fit within the scientific method, because that’s their primary thinking style. Emotion doesn’t play as big of a role in validation. Not to say that liberals are unfeeling, but just more likely to set emotion aside when judging an idea initially, and factor it in later. Checks out scientifically = valuable. Liberals can get just as emotionally attached to an idea, but it’s usually not the primary trigger for acceptance of an idea.”

Here is where the conflation of openness with scientific method comes in.

The conservative is the one being accused of emotional attachment to wrong ideas, in the case of resistance to man-caused global warming.

Yet the case for or against man’s role in global warming is patently not about facts at all. It is a religious narrative. Conservatives can smell religion at a hundred yards. Liberals, to make as silly a case as Mooney’s, are less aware that they are gripped by a gnostic religious narrative.

Man is bad. He is destroying the planet. Something should be done. And we have the knowledge, intelligence and commitment to save the planet from those nasty people who are enjoying themselves as Gaia expires.

One of the most impressive features of any discussion with a warmist is their passionate belief that those who oppose them must be evil. They have perfect knowledge – it is undisputable. Hence those who oppose them must be either ignorant, and needing education, or knowledgable, and therefore consciously bad.

So don’t talk to me of liberals’ greater capacity for handling ambiguity and lessened emotional reaction to policy. If that is so, I have not met one in a long life in politics. They are passionately anti-factual on any issue of concern to them, because their (largely unconscious) religious narrative determines what is factual.

I know it is unfair to pick on Janice Kennedy, the Citizen columnist of pronounced leftist views and unremitting devotion to the superiority of the female sex. She has obvious problems with a) the fact that males exist and b) don’t care for her blitherings and c) reality as sensible people understand it.

Nevertheless, occasionally she comes out with stuff so stupid, so inane, so unremittingly “we know what’s best for you” that it excites my comment. Today’s hymn of praise to the CBC was one such.

Her praise of the CBC today reached an apex of absurdity. The desperation to produce column-inches prevailed against reason and common sense. First, she allows that the CBC frequently produces drivel, but excuses much of it on budgetary cutbacks.

“Sure, you might justifiably criticize the corporation, past and present, for specific programs or personalities (”comedies” that were never funny, eye-glazing special interest shows, Hinterland Who’s Who interludes, Foster Hewitt); for recent programming desperation, misbegotten and doomed attempts to woo new audiences while alienating old; for excessive advertising on the main nightly newscast and pointless commercial imports – clearly responses to savaged budgets.”

Savaged budgets – read the CBC’s own statements of revenue and expenses here.

The 2011 Parliamentary appropriation was $1,159,938,000; the 2010 appropriation was 1,142,673,000. Avertizing revenue was higher in 2011 compared to 2010:$649,948 versus $566,714,000. So 2011 revenue was $1,809,886, chump change indeed.

Savaged budgets, my ass!

And the apogee of Kennedy’s paean to the Mother Corp? we should support it, regardless of any distortions it causes to the public discourse of this country because it belongs to us!

“No, the point is simply this: the CBC is Canada’s public broadcaster, period. That means it belongs to us – all of us – even when it makes decisions with which we disagree.

“So we have a stake in ensuring that the institution remains true to its mandate, something it can only do when it’s supported, in spirit and in fiscal fact, by most Canadians.”

“Public broadcaster” means, in fact, an organization which is out of the control of its Board of Directors, the Cabinet, the tax-payer, or its token regulator, the CRTC. The CBC is inwardly turned; it responds to neither to the market nor to the government. It was designed this way, by law.

The truth is, the CBC belongs to no one. Its broadasting licenses cannot be revoked by the nominal regulator, the CRTC (see section 23 of the Broadcasting Act). Its Board of Directors cannot fire or hire its President, who is appointed by Cabinet. Hiring and firing the President is the chief job of a a Board of Directors. Hence the Cabinet can appoint all the Tories it likes to the Board; it will have no effect, since they who have the best knowledge of the coroporation, cannot fire its President. The government is bound to respect its independence, meaning whatever the ethos of the Mother Corp determines what is real and true – see sction 52 of the Broadcasting Act.

The CBC is like a great baleen whale, floating through the oceans, solitary, solipsistic, self-involved, and sucking out tons of money from the Canadian taxpayer annually. It calls what it does the satisfaction of other people’s wants.

It is accountable to no one, and acts with impudence towards governments, regulators, private sector rivals, and the large majority of Canadians who lie north of the 401, east of Oshawa and west of Oakville.

The CBC belongs to us in the same sense as the British monarchy, only the monarchy generally behaves with greater sensitivity to the values of the people who pay for it. If ever there was a case for legal reform, it would be to bring the CBC into some kind of accoutability to its Board, to the government, and to the taxpayer.

And no Janice, we do not support the CBC, for the same reasons our ancestors did not support the pretensions of King Charles the First to rule by Divine Right.

A mighty judgment is coming.

I do not think there is anythng that needs to be added to Mark Steyn’s commentary, “Sunset on the Rideau“. Those who speak of the merits of multiculturalism either have not considered what culture actually means, or are active traitors to the ideals of liberal civilization.