Barrel Strength

So “Liberal leadership” is geting voters to remember a nearly defunct treaty that is now barely observed — if acknowledged — by the world’s major nations, rather than focus on a current Rube Goldberg-like carbon tax plan that even its creator is trying to forget.

If the Grits are lucky, Mike Dukakis may have his leather Snoopy helmet up for loan when they decide to put Steffi in the turret of a tank.

Direktlink zum Video auf Youtube

Though one would expect this of the Nutty Professor’s campaign circus, this embarrassing scene was part of the  Obamessiah’s tour:

But the Illinois senator used a teleprompter at both his Colorado events Monday — making for a particularly peculiar scene in Pueblo, where the prompter was set up in the middle of what is normally a rodeo ring.

That, folks, is the essence of “Big hat, no cattle”.

Just one week into the campaign and the Nutty Professor has resorted to the exhausted meme of the “Hidden Agenda”:

“That means not only that we want to pull Canadians toward conservatism, but Conservatives also have to move toward Canadians if they want to continue governing the country,” Harper said.

Saying he understood Harper’s comments to mean Canada still isn’t conservative enough, Dion said: “So, I want to ask him: how far is he more right-wing than Canadians? What is his hidden agenda that he doesn’t want to communicate to Canadians?”

Nice call, Count Floyd, because fear-mongering whisper campaigns have played out so well with your erstwhile counterparts in the United States. Clearly only a gold medal-winning PhD can discern that the hidden agenda is as intellectually sound a proposition as the Springfield Bear Patrol.

Out-of-touch academics.

In our newspapers.

With lame rumour-mongering.

We wish we were making this up.

So Stéphane Dion’s reaction to rising gas prices is essentially no different than the old borscht belt joke,

Patient: It hurts when I do this.

Doctor: Then stop doing that.

[...] because humanity is asking for more and more oil

Oh, the humanity, indeed!

CBC reporter Terry Milewski, in his implausibly named “Reality Check” segment on The National, has railed at the Conservative campaign for not following the lead of the Liberals and NDP in purchasing carbon offsets. Yet even his crack team of Googling wage-slaves have yet to come across the same facts presented elegantly by Steve Janke, namely that carbon offsets are a dubious proposition as practised by the Liberals. An actual check with reality shows that in this campaign they are nothing better than the Gaian equivalent of medieval papal indulgences: a boon to hucksters but worthless as a genuine means of salvation.

So here we stand, Mr. Milewski; we can do no other.

October 14, 2008 is Liberal Judgment Day!

Click below to play video:

Direktlink zum Video auf Youtube

Easy.

Oceanic Flight 815

And when the Dion campaign starts seeing polar bears on the island, they’ll just blame it on global warming.

Today the low-rent Carville stunt double opined thusly about Governor Sarah Palin:

“She’s got more than a skeleton in her closet, sir. Sarah Palin has Jurassic Park in her closet.”

Would that be the same Warren Kinsella who, as president of the Carleton University Students’ Association, tried to defund the campus Women’s Centre?

Someone may come up with an answer, to the horror of one who would prefer that political mass grave be sealed for eternity.

Let’s wait and see.

The stifling of freedom continues unchecked in Canada. I have been watching how the malign influence of human rights laws advances an agenda of “non-discrimination” in all departments of life including medical practice. Its purpose and effect is to consign religion and religious principles to the same domain as masturbation, namely, a private vice best kept hidden from the public, and certainly not to be practised in contradiction to the secular humanist agenda, the real official religion of Ontario. Doubt me? Read on.

Read the rest…

Years ago many Canadians were impressed by the performance of a thoughtful cabinet minister who tackled the spiteful polemics of Quebec separatists by refuting their claims in a series of carefully crafted letters buttressed by solid research and exemplary logic.

But now it appears, in the minds of Stéphane Dion and his inner circle, that intellectual integrity no longer “pops”:

With Maple Leaf Food’s Toronto meat-processing plant closed amid a nationwide outbreak of listeria infection, Mr. Dion accused the Tories of wanting to walk away from the “core” government responsibility of food inspection in favour of privatization. And the Liberal Leader named former Ontario Conservative MPs Jim Flaherty, John Baird and Tony Clement as key supporters of the plan.

[..]

“These are the same people – Mr. Flaherty, Mr. Baird, Mr. Clement – who are responsible [for] what happened in Walkerton, who privatized [Ontario's] propane inspection, and they want to do something equivalent about food inspections, which is at the core of what the government should do,” he said.

Nowhere in the story is there evidence of those ministers being connected to the document in question by any recorded means, just an assertion by Mr. Dion of a link. So let us be fair and accept Dion’s premise… by applying his new political set theory to his own turf.

His Green Shift proposal aims to reduce Canada’s output of carbon. And one of the Shift’s biggest proponents is Otawa South MP David McGuinty. And it reasonable to claim that on some given Sundays McGuinty will break bread with someone in Ontario’s government who promised to end that province’s reliance on coal-fired electric power plants. Promised yet failed utterly by his own admission, but continues to promise to do so.

Dion is committed to the Green Shift being revenue neutral. And that commitment is undoubtedly shared by Toronto MP Bob Rae. And Bob Rae knows a lot about revenue neutrality when it comes to taxing energy. He moved to defeat a government that proposed an 18 cent per gallon tax on gasoline, only to have it replaced by one that more than doubled the tax on gasoline.

But that’s just linkage. Tied together. With research. And logic. On our web pages.

Do you think Stéphane Dion shares the desire of your correspondent and our readers for a hot shower to rid oneself of the appalling dirty feeling that comes from exercises like this?

Of course not.

Canadians who like classical music will be aware that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has had enough of catering to those who like classical music, and is seeking to attain a younger audience by dumping classical music, and where it has not be overthrown entirely, by dumbing it down. Management discovered that the age profile of its classical music listeners was too old, too white, too Christian, for the multi-culti sensibilities of downtown Toronto, so they have replaced classical music (audience 1% of the population) with jazz (audience 1/10 of 1% of the population. Smooth move, Exlax.

In keeping with the insights of Clay Shirky, about how the Internet allows collaboration to replace institutions, I would like to alert the elite readership of this blog that an island of sanity is broadcasting classical music 24/7, Vermont Public Radio.

Why would thius be an example? Is VPR not an institution? Yes, of course. But the Internet is allowing VPR’s minute audience to expand as far as the Internet reaches, and that minute listenership can support VPR directly, without passing the money through a federal government on its way to a Crown Corporation.

Now you might wonder, if you think about it, is how VPR, supported by, let us say, 2% of the citizens of Vermont, whose total  population in 2006 was 624,000, can sustain a classical music station on the Internet, with five broadcast repeaters in that province, sorry, state, but Canada, population 33 million, and a CBC, whose radio budget in 2007-8 was $345,915,000 cannot.

Perhaps VPR is supported by 2% of the 1,315,000 people of neighbouring New Hampshire?

Cuts to classical music at the CBC are detailed here.

Some French-Canadian nationalists objected to Paul McCartney’s planned concert on the Plains of Abraham on the ground that an English singer would remind them of their status as a “conquered people.”

The eternal capacity of some French Canadian nationalists to feel themselves humiliated is a source of wonder and guilty amusement. The cheerful news is the derision with which the French Canadian blogsphere has responded, here and here. Most letter writers have been hostile to the objections of the nationalists too.

Do the Germans, Japanese, Hungarians, Poles, Italians, Czechs, and Bulgarians consder themselves permanently humiliated by their defeats since 1763? Since 1918? Since 1945?

For that matter, are the English burning with resentment about the Norman Conquest of 1066? You may recall that the Norman Conquest permanently transferred England out of the Scandinavian orbit into that of Rome (until the Reformation), established a new language, and forged one of the first medieval monarchical states. By and large England was much more transformed by the Norman Conquest than French Canada was by the defeat of Montcalm in 1763. Are we English still bitching about it, or have we embraced it as part of our identities and moved on since about 1200? Maybe it takes 150-300 years.

The only other group still whining about their defeats as a source of national identity are the Serbs. Hmmmn…. Any commonalities?

The general derision heaped on the objectors is a welcome sign that Quebec nationalist whine has a diminished appeal among the Quebecois. We can only hope.

In the eyes of Justice McLachlin and her co-ideologues on the nominating committee, “controversy” is a variable absolute:

McGill ethicist refused OC because she was ‘too controversial’

[...]

The Order’s receptiveness to new, taboo-breaking social mores was evident well before the Morgentaler appointment. The Order last year approved the candidacy of Brent Hawkes, a Toronto cleric who performed Canada’s first same-sex marriage. Also last year, the Order appointed writer Jane Vance Rule, lauding her specifically for “populating her novels with homosexual as well as heterosexual characters.” And when it honoured Jean Chrétien, the Order put a curious emphasis on his support for same-sex unions.

Few people, even critics of gay rights, made a fuss. I think most Canadians thought the Order was making an effort to reflect a significant current of public opinion. It’s hard to be against broad-mindedness.

Now, however, it suddenly turns out that the Order is not so broad-minded after all. It has refused admission to Margaret Somerville, the McGill University ethicist who is a leading critic of the social views that the Order welcomes.

And what does Ontario’s favourite Catholic schoolboy made good have to say about this? Don’t wait for the translation, Mr. McGuinty!

There are mornings when you feel the judiciaryneed to be taken out and given a sensitivity course, not in the sensitivity to every whiner group, no, but to an idea of what judges should never tamper with.

A little humility about the extent of their competence, about the extent to which they can never substitute their opinions for those of others. I know it goes against the entire thrust of legal training since the Constitution Act of 1982, but that is the point. Leonard Cohen predicted “there won’t be nothing, nothing you can measure any more” in his song, The Future, and he foretold the truth. What he could not tell was the role of the judiciary in politicizing the length of every yardstick.

I cite two recent examples of judicial overreach: the Quebec judge who overruled the father of a 12 year old, who was grounded, and the Manitoba judge who overuled the medical opinion that a man was brain dead, and in the process caused three physicians to resign from the Grace Hospital.

In the Quebec case, the father had grounded the daughter for disobedience about going on the Internet.

“Madam Justice Suzanne Tessier of the Quebec Superior Court ruled on Friday [June 20th] that denying the girl permission to go on the school trip was an excessive punishment. The girl’s lawyer, Lucie Fortin, said, “She’s becoming a big girl” and described the school trip as “a unique event in her life”, the Globe and Mail reported. In arguing the case, Fortin cited Sections 159 and 604 of the Quebec Civil Code, which allow minors in some circumstances to initiate court proceedings relating to the exercise of parental authority. Section 159 is used in “extreme circumstances”, such as cases of parental negligence.

“The father’s lawyer, Kim Beaudoin said that her client is “stunned by this situation. He feels like he’s lost his daughter”. He is appealing the court’s decision.”

Bravo! Judge Tessier, you are in line for a spanking from the Appeal Court.

On the Manitoba situation, the Post asks the right questions:

“Beyond judges acting with urgency, there is the unresolved question of whether court compulsion of health care workers is just. At the moment, the highest value in medical bioethics is individual autonomy and consequent respect for individual decision-making. That value was brought into doubt when the Manitoba judge questioned the physicians’ medical expertise and, at the same time, required that they continue to exercise it in violation of their professional and personal ethics. Should physicians and other health care professionals be required to choose between hurting a patient by ineffective medical treatment, and a possible jail sentence for being in contempt of court?”

Though I do not hold with a general legalized right of physicians to kill patients, they make decisions which result in the cessation of artificial support for life, nearly every day in some cases. They pull the plugs, and the equipment moves on the next person requiring care. If collectively they do this every day, should we not legalize it? Permit me some moral ambiguity here. Doctors make medical decisions, and medically you are meat, a physical being, not a spiritual one. When that meat is no longer self-sustaining, you have entered the domain of medical decision-making.  They have other people whose lives could be sustained by the attention and equipment they are spending on your parent’s comatose body. Whenever a judge deals with these matters as if it there were a right to be kept alive, they forget the costs imposed on everyone else whose fathers and mothers lie dying for the want of attention going to your parent’s soon-to-be corpse. Life may be sacred, but not to physciansin their medical capacity. They deal in death, and deathis the natural outcome of life. We have no right to the indefinite avoidance of our appointment with our Maker, particularly if that avoidance is medically useless, and a burden on the still-living in need of care.

Judges need to restrict the tendency to extend rights where rights can have no bearing, and state decision-making where the state has no comeptence.

The judiciary reminds me of a scene in Amadeus, where Mozart is infuriated that he has to submit samples of his work to a committee of Italians to get the job of music teacher to the Emperor’s niece.

VON STRACK
Mozart, you are not the only composer in Vienna.

MOZART
No, but I’m the best.

VON STRACK
A little modesty would suit you better.

A judiciary filled, at the very best,  with Salieris, Quantzes, and Telemanns, and many thinking themselves Mozarts, whose judgments are cutting-edge advances of human rights. Spare us!

I would rather be governed by 100 people chosen randomly from the telephone book than by the Canadian judiciary. I mean it. Or by the semi-random group of people assembled in the House of Commons. Hey! Parliamentary supremacy. What a concept!

 And I write this as Mozart’s finale to the Symphony #41, the Jupiter, is playing. I know the difference between talent and pretention, and so do most Canadians.