Barrel Strength

Geert Wilders, the oppressed Dutch politician, under fire from the establishment for saying true things about Islam, has the momentum in forthcoming national elections.

See the article by Paul Belien in the Brussels Journal.

Will everyone please pay attention to the Wilders phenomenon? It is a huge issue, whether a leading national politician can be thrown in jail for saying that Islam is an enemy to civilization, and there is no defence possible under Dutch law? Except by taking over the government, that is.

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?

Conducted by Bruce Bawer, author of “While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within“:

http://www.rights.no/publisher/publisher.asp?id=59&tekstid=3259

I ought to have seen Joanne Nova’s Climate Money before now. If you haven’t, you too can cite it in the unlikely  event of being invited to Geoffrey Simpson’s for dinner. In short, government billions for AGW; millions somewhere for skeptics.

James Delingpole, that right-wing vicious attack dog – God I love him – has come out with something similar.

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?

A great source of left wing insanity is Open Left. It helps me guage the extent to which Climategate and the implosion of global warming doctrine has made any progress in leftist mindshare. Zilch. Nada.

In a recent posting, Paul Rosenberg of Open Left cited NASA’s latest figures, courtesy of James Hansen.

[These figures are trashed in Watts up with that here]

The alarmist figures show a one degree Celsius rise of global temperature since 1850, the end of the Little Ice Age. [Never mind the conceptual difficulties of a "global" temperature and the statistical underpinnings thereof].

This one degree rise in temperature since 1850 shows, according to Rosenberg:

“No rational person can pretend that there’s any doubt about global warming. It’s way too late for that. By now it’s clear that the “let’s hear both sides” crowd is openly pro-lie, and in fact, pro-end-of-human-civilization. They are moral monsters. Period.”

So, let us get this straight. A one degree rise in global temperature (forgetting all the measurement issues associated with the declining number of weather stations), since the end of the Little Ice Age (1300-1850) means that the world has warmed up by one degree centigrade. And this is a moral catastrophe!

Did human-generated carbon dioxide emissions play any role in this?  What role? What proportion of this quite insignificant rise of one degree centigrade have to do with us? This question is never asked.

Never mind, you hideous moral monster! My feeling trumps your fact! In the instant case, the hideous moral momonster is George Will. This does not suffice to temper author Rosenberg’s vitriol. The problem is – you guessed it – the System. (How many times have you hear a leftie use the words “the system” to prevent rational thought? But I digress.)

Speaking of George Will and how he was not censured enough, Open Left rants to its true believers:

“The problem …is the system.

“And not “just” when it comes to global warming. The problem is the system when it comes to everything. The “war on terror”, the financial system, the broken Senate, the dictatorial Supreme Court, all of these are ultimately nothing more than symptoms of the underlying fact that the system is the problem. Because the system simply does not care about the truth. Which means it doesn’t care about anything or anyone, other than covering its own sweet sociopathic ass. “

Open Left then proceeds to castigate Obama for not being pur et dur enough.

Conclusion: Any time you are tempted to think that you are being too harsh in your understanding of the political Left, read their blogs. Confirm and strengthen us, Lord, in our faith. And confirm and strengthen us, lefties, in our rejection of your doctrines and self-righteous  moral posturing, by better acquaintance with what you think and how you behave. Amen.

Was this a case of Charles Johnson traveling with his fan club?

Man caught at airport with 44 lizards in pants

Real men iron their shirts. At least I like to think so. 

Ironing has many advantages.

The activity is mindless in the zen sense, a series of repetitive actions of flattening fabric with the hands and passing the iron over it to bring perfection to wrinkled matter. Like ritual of any kind, the activity misleads the mind strategically, so that the mind thinks that it is busy doing something while it empties itself. It is a whole lot easier than sitting in a chair contemplating one’s thought processes. It involves less social self-presentation than church. It involves less risk from inattention than driving. It is far less expensive than fly-fishing, being able to be conducted in your basement with a minimum of equipment.  It conduces to large amounts of spousal approval, while permitting serious listening to one’s favourite music. 

As I ironed my wife’s blouses, I considered the fact that the buttons of women’s shirts run down the left side rather than the right. I speculated whether some bored housewife in the late 1950s used this same fact to argue that the differences between men and women were merely conventional, like the placement of buttons on a shirt. It would have marked the humble orign of one of the world’s stupidest and most damaging ideas, that has trampled through society like King Kong in a rage.

A friend of mine who went to university after me, in the 1980s, said that there were two large unquestionable ideas reigning in his day: 1) Reagan was stupid and capitalism was evil and 2) the differences between men and women were merely conventional. You will recall in the seventies and eighties  that mothers gave their boys girls’ toys and their girls’ Tonka trucks, in the attempt to demasculinize the male and masculinize the female, though they did not use those terms. There was also the doctor who used some poor boy who had lost his penis in a medical accident. The boy, used as the poster child for the notion that a genetic male could be raised as a female, subsequently resumed his male identity, got reconstructive surgery and married. There were many attempts of a similar nature to eradicate male-female differences.

How come these experiments, when conducted by social engineers, are never labelled ideological? When parents  support spanking children , they are being “ideological”. When parents oppose spanking children, they are called “progressive”? A recent study from social researchers at Calvin college supported the benefits of spanking between the ages of two and six for the later development of responsible adults. I do not know whether any such study can prove anything useful, but I did remark that the Usual Suspects sniffed that the Christian origin of Calvin college maight have induced a bias into the experimental method. As if the leftist assault on society by Horkheimer, Adorno and their successors and imitators proceeded from some Burkean satisfaction with hierarchical social arrangements.

There was always an  ambiguity in the argument too, of the socially constructed view of  male-female differences. They could never quite get it clear whether the differences were socially constructed, or whether the male was, in essence, just violent and evil. We men were all supposed to wear the red ribbons of shame for twenty five years because some abused Algerian boy, Gamil Gharbi, renamed Marc Lepine, killed the fourteen women engineering students at the Universite de Montreal. Even in 2010 it takes a brave newspaper to publish an article suggesting this tragedy might have been about Islamic male contempt for women than reflective of a general male hostility to female success.

http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/news/broadcasters/bbc-trust-to-investigate-science-coverage/5009412.article

It cannot be long now before the trials begin.

BBC Trust to investigate science coverage

6 January, 2010 | By Jasmine Phillips

In a recent advice column the issue concerned the tolerance of the housewife for her husband’s Playboys in the living room for the children to see. You can guess the tut-tutting from those guardians of morality.  The readers were warned that dad’s Playboys might give the girls the false idea that their body image and their ability to satisfy a man sexually were of primary importance.

Well, actually…. they are. And anyone who denies it is in rampant denial fo the facts. The ability of the woman to satisfy a man sexually is absolutely primary. It is job #1. Sometimes it is the less immediate concern, such as when mum and dad are shopping for groceries, reading stories to the kids or cooking dinner. Work can interfere too. But over the long haul – especially if there is going to be a long haul – satisfying your man sexually is the job. Because if that is working out, everything else is working out.  Sex life is the measure of the relationship.

And if you disagree with me, please go live somewhere else, preferably in a convent.

CBS news reports the following from New Jersey.

Police said as many as 11 students beat up an eighth-grader honor student in an apparent case of revenge. The victim, who is Hispanic, suffered severe injuries, and it was possible he may lose sight in one eye. It is not believed, however, that he was the victim of a hate crime. Police said the student who threw the first punch was also Hispanic, and the other students all come from diverse backgrounds.

It is good to know that that the crime was driven, not by hate, but rather by love.

More money for the rich, through invisble taxation.

Christopher Booker is a fierce opponent of the whole scheme.

“This is the new global industry based on buying and selling the right to emit CO2, estimated soon to be worth trillions of dollars a year, which through schemes such as the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism and the EU’s Emissions Trading System is making a small minority of people, including Al Gore, extremely rich.

“The only really concrete achievement of Copenhagen was to win agreement to the perpetuating of those Kyoto rules that have created this vast industry, which has two main beneficiaries. On one hand are that small number of people in China and India who have learnt how to work this system to their huge advantage. On the other are all those Western entrepreneurs who have piled into what has become the fastest‑growing commodity market in the world.

“The part played at Copenhagen by all the tree-huggers, abetted by the BBC and their media allies, was to keep hysteria over warming at fever pitch while the politicians haggled over the real prize, to keep the Kyoto system in place.”

As the science behind global warming evaporates, it becomes necessary to increase the vilification of opposition, while changing the subject. Pull back from any concrete assertions of fact, and sling shit at your opponents from the high ground of self-declared moral superiority.

George Mobiot’s vapourings in this week’s Groniad are a case in point. Observe how he eliminates any middle ground:

“‘Humanity is no longer split between conservatives and liberals, reactionaries and progressives, though both sides are informed by the older politics. Today the battle lines are drawn between expanders and restrainers; those who believe that there should be no impedimentsand those who believe that we must live within limits. The vicious battles we have seen so far between greens and climate change deniers, road safety campaigners and speed freaks, real grassroots groups and corporate-sponsored astroturfers are just the beginning. This war will become much uglier as people kick against the limits that decency demands.”

Notice two distortions by which Monbiot frames the debate. First, those who oppose are inherently unreasonable: Read the rest…

Klavan: “Shame and guilt and self-hatred are universal.  Whether you chalk it up to original sin or to Oedipus or call it Jewish guilt or Catholic guilt or white guilt or black guilt, every single one of us knows he is not the person he was made to be.  There are honest ways to confront that.  You can kneel before God and pray for forgiveness and live in the joy of his love.  Or you can drink heavily and make sardonic remarks until you destroy everyone you care about and then keel over dead – that’s honest too. 

“But what a lot of people do is try to escape their sense of shame dishonestly by constructing elaborate moral frameworks that allow them to parade their virtue and their lavish repentance without any real inconvenience to themselves while simultaneously indulging in self-righteousness by condemning others for their impenitent evil. 

“That’s the bad version of religion – the sort of religion Jesus came to dismantle.  And that’s exactly the sort of religion leftism is:  an elaborate system for hiding shame behind a cheap mask of virtue. 

“That’s why they demonize any opposition.  To them, we’re not just disagreeing with them, we’re threatening to tear off the mask of their virtue and reveal them to themselves.  Which, without God or sufficient whiskey, would be unbearable.

Andrew Klavan is a screenwriter, crime novelist, and former atheist.

The issue is: why is there a law available by which these people could be prosecuted? Why is a domestic spat in a hotel the source of criminal prosecution?

“Explaiing his reasons for dismissing the case, he said Mrs Tazi’s claim that she was verbally attacked by the couple for up to an hour had not been borne out by other prosecution witnesses, who suggested that any discussions lasted around seven minutes.”