Barrel Strength

I know how I feel about Dr. Henry Morgentaler getting the Order of Canada. I do not know whether I am justified in my feeling.

Morgentaler is a hideous man. His doctrines are appalling. His view that the the primacy of the woman over her fetus is so absolute, it cannot be right. There is no balance in his view. Freedom to choose is the freedom under all circumstances to be able to abort a future child, no matter at what stage of pregnancy. And if you object to that view, you will be accused of believing that women are not and should not be absolutely sovereign over all decisions of reproduction. I am guilty as charged.

Society, in some form, in some way, has an interest in its own survival, and consequently in the reproductivity of its women. This has always been the foundation of our laws controlling access to abortion. Consequently I do not consider that women are absolutely sovereign in their reproductivity. They have the preponderant interest, to be sure, but not absolute freeedom of choice. Call me a compromizing weasel on this issue, and I will agree with you. Most of us are all compromizing weasels on the subject of killing the unborn. I do not think even the freedom-to-choose crowd contemplate killing the unborn with equanimity, they just want to shut off their consciences. We would be very convinced of our own rectitude if we were not compromizers, or persuaded of absolute doctrines on the matter, as many are.

I can understanding killing the guilty for capital crimes, but not for parking tickets. Likewise killing the unborn for our convenience, that is a harsh doctrine. Yet we live by it. We put into practice our beliefs in this matter all the time. And the same people who uphold the euphemistic “freedom to choose” are most often the people who are repelled by capital punishment. Go figure.

But back to Morgentaler. There is something deeply wrong about the man which defies my powers of description, and possibly my understanding. I see him as the Nazis’ last poisoned gift to mankind. Somehow the Nazi vision of evil was so pure and absolute (kill all the Jews, because they are the source of evil) that its doctrines have perversely, weirdly infected the doctor, who did time in Auschwitz. I cannot imagine the stress of being in a hell created by a political ideology that declares that you are the emanation of Satan, but Auschwitz would come close. I hope never to undergo a similar process of degradation, enslavement, starvation and hideous, unremembered death at the hands of demons who hate you and wish to see you and your kind exterminated, as one would a wasps’ nest under the cottage deck which has just stung your baby. His absorption of some of the absolutism of their doctrines, and its weird refraction as an evangelist of aborting human fetuses, is an imaginative stretch on my part, but I prefer to situate the cause of evil outside of Morgentaler himself. In this I may be too generous towards him. He may be authentically and originally evil, without assistance from the Nazis.

Whatever he thought he was doing for the cause of women, he has so far exceeded that goal that he has become a menace to our survival. He is not the right sort of person to be honoured in this way by the Order of Canada. The selection committee has lost its moral bearings if they could not see that they have honoured the exponent of quite evil and disgusting doctrines, which are far in excess of the immediate cause, questionable as it is, of access to abortions.

Those of us who follow the debate about global warming, as if it were a debate and not a settled dogma, track the following questions:

1) is it occurring?

2) How much is man engendering?

3) How important is it to solve, and how readily is it solved, relative to all other ecological/disease/development problems?

Roughly speaking, here is what my readings have told me.

1) The earth has been warming since the end of the last ice age, roughly 15,000 years ago (with an extensive break for a micro ice age they call the Younger Dryas from 12-10,000 years ago). Warming may be accelerating in recent centuries. Contrariwise, it has been much warmer in the distant past, and vastly colder in the distant past. We have not yet attained the height of the previous interglacial warming period, when freshwater ponds stood near the Arctic Ocean, which are now called pingoes.

If the recent (last million years) past is any guide, we are currently in the last few millennia before the onset of the next ice age. We have been through 18 ice ages the last million years, with gradually increasing extremes of cold occurring as the ice age has progressed. All of human history, from the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago, has occurred in the latest interglacial.

More recently, global warming appears to have stopped as of the year 2000, but I don’t read too much into this one way or another, since any general trend in the earth’s climate less than a few hundred years long is generally of no enduring significance. Nevertheless, global warming and cooling can happen suddenly, so that we can be plunged back into an ice age in less than a decade. I cannot reconcile these two statements without recourse to longer explanations than you have time to read.

2) Not much. Having read as much geological history as I have, the claims of many scientists that we are tipping the world over into a heat death strike me as vastly implausible. I also notice that geologists, who are accustomed to dealing with a thousand years as the shortest possible time-span they reckon in, tend to have a distinctly different view of climate than climate scientists, who track weather over time, and deal, in essence, with air, not rock.

3) I side with Bjorn Lomborg that if we had a hundered major global problems to solve, such as malaria, clean drinking water, education for girls etc, global warming would be last on the list in terms of cost-effectiveness of solving. Cold kills more people than heat, every winter, year in, year out.

Now today’s sermon is about the meaning of science. The philosophy of science is that it is only provisionally true. It must frame propositions that can be disproved. If it cannot generate propositions that can be disproved, it is not science. Hence the Wolfgang Pauli insult than some things “are not even wrong” - cannot generate propositions whose truth can be measured against results.

It was intersting to read in the National Post yesterday (”Overheated Claims”) an article by Roger Pielke, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, citing two US climate scientists, Claudia Tebaldi and Reto Knutti, the following passage, quoted twice:

“It is important to note that climate projections, decades or longer in the future by definition, cannot be validated directly through observed changes. Our confidence must therefore come from other sources”

Would you please read that again and tell me where that confidence should come from? If observed changes over decades fail to track predictions, over decades, then where is our conficence in climate modelling to come from? The operations of the Holy Spirit?

As Pielke observes:
“The IPCC issues predictions for 20-30-year periods in the futiure, and updates them every 6-7 years, so in practice its current predictive capanbilities can never be measured against real world data.”

In short, if you read the words carefully, they are saying that climate predictions are not science, because not falsifiable. This is exactly the thrust of the scientific objection to Intelligent Design.

Hence you will understand my increasing belief that Climate Science has reached the stage of being voodoo for white people. Not just metaphorically, but now, as we cast aside the last links to falsifiability, to pure magical thinking.

The world grows grimmer by the day. First the cherished Scottish history is relegated to the trash heap. And if that isn’t painful enough, the beloved scotch itself has been upstaged by the Japanese.

The Nikka distillery in Japan has taken an interesting turn with single cask malt whiskey called Yoichi. Their website describes it as follows.

“It is purely bottled from one barrel without mixing whiskies from other barrels or water…. Each barrel has its own flavor because of the difference in material and condition, kinds of trees for barrels, the sizes and times the barrels are used, how to barn and so on.”

It certainly brings a variety to a single malt brand instead of drinking the same-old . The Japanese efforts in whisky making haven’t gone unrewarded, as earlier this year the Yoichi 20-years old became “the first variety produced outside Scotland to win the coveted single malt award in an international competition run by Whisky Magazine, the main industry publication… The decision to give the top prize to Yoichi followed a blind tasting of more than 200 of the world’s finest varieties by a panel of 16 of the world’s leading whisky experts.”

Perhaps it is a case of minding the dreaded EU legislated carbon emissions, as article goes on to state that the “Traditional distilling apparatus such as coal-fired pot stills, used widely in Japan but rarely seen in Scotland, was also praised for producing a superior dram.”

And I am sure their carbon footprint is exactly zero.

“A 12-YEAR-OLD girl in Scotland brought up by her parents on a strict vegan diet has been admitted to hospital with a degenerative bone condition said to have left her with the spine of an 80-year-old woman….

Last year, an American vegan couple were given a life sentence for starving their six-week-old baby to death. In 2001 two vegans from west London were sentenced to three years’ community rehabilitation after they admitted starving their baby to death.”

Your correspondent received the following travel story from a friend.

Last week we decided that we wanted to visit an island in Bahamas that was off the beaten path. Given the limited ferry routes, and our desire to spend only one night in a place with limited amenities , our choices were limited to the island chains of Eleuthera and Andros. We selected Eleuthera based on the logistical issues and set off for Spanish Wells, an island that is about half a mile wide and two miles long with a population of about 1,600. Other than that salient fact, we didn’t know much about this island.

On the way there in a ferry, my friend sat beside a black man and innocently enquired if he was going to Spanish Wells as well. He pointed at his forearm and said to my friend, “they don’t like my kind there.” Needless to say that this came as a surprise to us given that the population of Bahamas is 90% black. We disembarked the ferry and went into a restaurant to eat our breakfast. The waitress/cashier/hostess was white and that is when I started noticing similarity to Man-O-War cay in the Abaco island chain.

Both islands are populated by white evangelical Christians and both of them are dry. The proprietor of the only restaurant in Man-O-War cay, told me that he had a liquor license but didn’t want to serve alcohol, because the locals would ostracize him and he would lose business. He blamed it on “narrow-minded religious people” and said that with a straight face, as I gazed at the 6″ brass cross he was wearing around his neck. I was told that at one point they did have a liquor store in Spanish Wells, but it caused too many problems. Given that there is only one level of government, the individual cays do not have right to ban alcohol but societal pressures keep these two cays dry, although it is easy to acquire it with no prohibition on bringing it in, unlike some of the native communities in northern Canada.

Spanish Wells itself is a prosperous community that relies on fishing for its source of wealth. The fisherman on this island sell all their lobster catch to Red Lobster chain of restaurants in North America. It is obvious that this hard work has been rewarding. Houses are well maintained, roads are clean, lawns are pristine and there is very little crime. I was informed by the young lady to leave my rented golf cart in the front, with the keys in the ignition, if the counter was unattended. The beaches are amazing and one can walk a couple of miles out into the water and still be only waist deep. About 70% of the population goes to the three churches on Sunday and I heard more Christian music at the church fund raiser than I have in my entire life. This cay takes it cultural cues from US in many ways. They are rabid sports fans and follow New York Yankees avidly as if it is their home team. Golf carts are painted with various sports motifs.

Like the rest of the world, there is the usual divide between the younger generation and the rest. The friendships on the island are over a wider age group, because of the small number of people in each age group. In the 18-35 age group one of the things to do is to go to the beach at night, light a bonfire, drink beer and smoke marijuana. It is not enough to keep the two resident policemen on the island busy . Several of them had a desire to leave the island, as they found is boring and stifling, but they also understood that they had no means of doing it. The openly referred to blacks as niggers and opined as to what might happen to you in Nassau, the capital of Bahamas. Blacks are not made welcome here and that explains why the population is, in my estimate, 98% white. Rhodies would feel at home here.

Meanwhile back in the country formerly known as Rhodesia we find this:

I had lunch in Mutare yesterday, a town in Zimbabwe on the Mozambique border.

To give you a benchmark — bread is currently over 110 million a loaf; on 22nd April it was 40 million per loaf.

The lunch bill: soup — 50 million, oxtail — 600 million, coffee — 50 million, with no charge for the pink ice cream.

During the meal, one of my mates was drinking beer — 750ml bottles of Castle Lager (fondly called bombers). He ordered a fifth one, was advised that the price, which when he ordered his first, second, third and fourth ones was 160 million per bottle, had gone up to 340 million per bottle.

That’s right — during lunch there was a price increase…

In her recent interview, Lessing admits that Communism, to which she was once attracted, is rubbish.

“Communists, she now believes, are ‘murderers with a clear conscience’. But it took her a long time to get there. ‘Yes I called Marxism “the sweetest dream” in one of my books. Then I discovered it was all a load of old socks. It seems incredible now that quite intelligent people believed in it all. What doubts there were were expressed in sly jokes. The jokes contradicted everything we believed in. We used to joke about how we were wrong about everything.”

They were wrong about everything, and the mystery is how they simultaneously knew it and pretended to be the vanguard of the omniscient.

Lessing wrote some interesting science fiction, a field not often taken up by lefties, possibly because its premises usually suppose technological progress, t which they seem opposed in fact if not always in principle.

The story takes place on the planet Shikasta (Earth) tens of thousands of years in the past. The all-wise Canopians have the humans in their tutelage, living is stone igloos in ordered ranks under the indirect rule of the UN-type Canopian colonial bureaucrats. The story is written from the point of view of a would-be colonial bureaucrat from the Sirian system, who envies the Canopians their superior moral and social development. Then disaster strikes. The Puttiorian Empire, under the direction of the Criminal Planet Shammat, disrupts the massive phase array (the Lock) that keeps the minds of the humans in thrall. Liberated from the all-wise mental domination of the Canopians, the humans fall into history: they achieve freedom.

It is not pictured that way by Lessing of course. The terrible Puttiorians and the ambassadors from the Criminal Planet Shammat leer at girls’ breasts, wear leather shoes, and smirk knowingly. The more I contemplated the eternal smug dullness of the Canopian rule, the more I thought it resembled a benign North Korea, and the more evident it was that the Criminal Planet Shammat was governed by me, George Jonas and Mark Steyn. Ridding Shikasta of Canopian-Sirian Con-Dominium was the obligation of every free thinking moral person. Come to think of it, it still is.

“With her latest book she has come full circle to the Rhodesia of her childhood. There is a moving chapter in which she describes returning as an elderly woman to the country she had once loved, only to find it devastated by years of Mugabe’s tyrannous rule. She encounters a drunk and obnoxious black man who won’t let her see her father’s old farm. She had been a great champion of black rule.”

Ah! To live long enough to see all the errors of our ways. You can take girl out of the Party, and eventually you can take the Party out of the girl.

Notes for a eulogy, Monday April 21st, 2008, Smiths Falls, Ontario

Doug never needed one of these [a script] because Doug was always himself. He never pretended to be anything he wasn’t, and you always knew where you stood with him. In a very real sense, what he said was what he thought. What you saw was what you got. I’ll tell you what I saw 36 years when I arrived in Germany to work with Doug at the Forces radio station in Lahr. I saw a hippie. He had a full beard, hair down to his shoulders, and a leather cowboy hat. He even had a Volkswagen van. It was a pleasant surprise to learn that Doug the hippie was also Doug, the very serious professional broadcaster. He taught all of us a lot.

Doug was the best coach the Ottawa Senators never had. He would have made a great general manager too. When the phone rang after a particularly rough period of hockey, I always knew it was Douglas, but I never knew what he was going to say. It was always interesting and insightful. He knew the game of hockey. We weren’t happy about this season at all.

Doug was always after me to take up golf, and I always resisted. He was very patient with me, and he probably thought that if he waited long enough, it would happen. Well, at least one of us waited a little too long. I think it was me. I know I would have enjoyed it. I know I would have had lots and lots of free advice.

The only time he ever got a little boring was when I wanted to talk about my children because that was when he wanted to talk about his children. Karina and Harry, I know a lot more about you two than you think I do. He thought the world of you two. He loved you for your struggles and for your successes. We can all be happy that he saw both of you doing so well.

Things were going great for Doug lately and they were only going to get better. His enthusiasm for political causes and his broadcasting skill were starting to come together on the Internet. The interviews he did on his Web site, The Right Side, were beginning to attract a lot of attention. He was making a big contribution to a growing community. When I looked at some comments about him last week, I wasn’t surprised to see how sad and unhappy people were but I was surprised to see just how many there were and how much they counted on him to point the way. Doug came right out and said what a lot people think. He was a great source of information and inspiration to a lot of people. Just the archive of interviews he left us will be important in the years ahead.

Doug was a great friend to me. You never had to be on your guard with him. You could be yourself. He made people feel comfortable because he was sensitive and gentle and kind. Janice, nobody knows that better than you. I know that he looked to you for so much and he always got more. The two of you were complete and you will never be apart.

Two people I have known died this week, both without warning. One, Doug Aldridge, I have known from Reform days. He had come to Ottawa for a medical appointment, where he had been informed that he was free of cancer. I spoke to him last Firday on the phone. We reminisced and discussed the freedom of speech and the Human Rights Commissions/Levant/Steyn issues. He drove out to see his daughter west of Ottawa on the weekend and was killed in a three-vehicle smash-up on Highway 7 coming back. Bang.

Of Elizabeth deWolfe I know less. She was alive last week and dead this week. She was the sister-in-law of a friend of mine, taught school, did good work, was an admirable person. Both Doug and Elizabeth might have been expected to live for decades more, were they not at the wrong end of the bell curve of mortality.

“Death brings clarity to other judgments”. Thus spoke my friend the Dark Lord as we considered these events. No matter what your problems with your job, your boss, your clients, your wife, your kids, the prospect of death puts them all in the right perspective. “Let death be your adviser” said Don Juan Matus in one of the Cataneda books. “Imagine it sitting on your shoulder, and seek its counsel”, he said. I was in my twenties at the time and felt immortal, but I still recall it. Now I think I understand what the old sorcerer meant.

Calculate the number of weeks you expect to live, as an exercise. If I die between 75 and 85 years of age- may I be so lucky - I will have between a thousand and a thousand six hundred hundred weeks to live. That is a comprehensible number, though it is not as large as one might imagine. My days are numbered. So are yours. Enjoy them. It is all you get in this body, even if you believe we are recycled through other bodies periodically. And if we are not so recycled, it is even more poignant.

The lamps are going out all over the world:

Direct link to video on Google Video

How far has the regime of fear penetrated? Very far indeed. Take this example. How difficult has it become to have a rational discussion about government policy touching on visible minorities the civil service?

According to my informants, it has become impossible.

The federal public service has a plan to hire a lot of visible minorities to the federal public service, about one in five according to an announcement in 2000.

Read the rest…

The financial earthquake that has been rumbling on Wall St. since last year, finally made its presence felt amongst the non-financial chattering classes this year, as zeros disappeared from their trust fund cheques.  It is hard to believe that they are willing to help the uber-rich on Wall St. by providing recourse to public funds and are even willing to buy them a Dalwhinnie to ease their pain.  Is this madness the end of the Conservative period that began with Reagan and Thatcher?

Read the rest…

From time to time the Internet directs me to interesting people with whom I am not on all fours, but who seem to be in the domain of the real. Terry Glavin seems to be one of them, at least on the subject of leftist anti-semitism. Andrew Potter is another. Both seem to be judging the effectiveness of left-wing causes by real-world criteria.

Read the rest…

Peter Foster asks in today’s Financial Post:

“To put it in a nutshell, why is valid economic theory so counter-intuitive to the human mind? Also, why do liberals feel the need to get on such a moral high horse in their condemnation of economic truths?”

Answer to the first question: Envy. And a wise concern for not being cheated.
Answer to the second question: Moral superiority is its own reward.

My point is that liberal market societies have emerged from certain historical processes, late in time, and could be lost for millennia if certain conditions are not satisfied.

Read the rest…

Short shrift is given to youngsters in Asian culture and that is one of the factors which has inhibited the development there in all spheres, including scientific, cultural and economic. That is why one sees leaders of China and India, who would feel more comfortable in a nursing home than the world stage. But here is a meme to watch.

Read the rest…

I sent a letter to Margaret Wente of the Globe and Mail. This was the article in question. An exposition at the Royal Ontario Museum on Darwin could not find corporate sponsorship. Wente concluded that new scientific findings on the biological bases of sex, race and character difference were as offensive to liberal dogmas as evolution is to the creationists.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinions/columnists/Margaret+Wente.html

Dear Mrs Wente:

Your article on Darwin in this Saturday’s Globe was well taken.  The implications of modern research for notions of equality, race, intelligence, character and crime are extremely challenging for those who have believed that only the structures of society prevent the achievement of equality, and engender racism/sexism/nationalism.

Read the rest…