Barrel Strength

I like old James Lovelock, all 90 years of him. The founder of Gaia theory has been waging a lonely battle to win acceptance for what to most of us seems obvious, when you allow yourself to think about it. The Gaia theory says that the planet is a living system. Life on earth – the community of living organisms – does its best to maintain an equilibrium.

Take the atmosphere as an example. Gaia theory argues that life maintains oxygen in a dynamic process at 21% by volume of the atmosphere . Add even 1% more oxygen and fires might start too easily. Or consider methane, which is maintained at 1.5 parts per million over the last  million of years. Yet methane oxidizes so that 67% of it disappears every ten years. For methane to be kept so exactly constant, as ice core samples show, argues for processes which work towards an exquisite equilibrium. Life is doing something to maintain conditions suitable for life: that is the nub of Gaia theory.

Locvelock has many opponents.

• To the geologists the Gaia hypothesis is superfluous. The processes of geochemistry are sufficient to explain the equlibria.
• To the computer modelling crowd, the ones one foist anthropogenic global warming on us, Lovelock does not use computers and relies on actual physical measurements. This is way too empirical for their tastes.
• Gaia theory is all too purposeful for Dawkins and the othodox Darwinists, in that the randomness of the mutations is somehow threatened if the mutations work towards overall purposes, such as planetary stability.

So why do I like Lovelock? I like him for the same reason I like George Orwell. They both share a belief the prevailing error of their ages. In Orwell’s case, it was a belief that the market was finished and that a planned society was both better and historically inevitable. In Lovelock’s case it is eco-doomism of a certain plausible kind.  Their errors have had a paradoxical result. By allowing them to share the prevailing errors of their respective political epochs, each has been granted access into the intellectual  and social milieux of a variety of phonies, poseurs, and fanatics. If they had not shared those assumptions, at least in part, they would have stood aside from the main currents of their ages, such as Friedrich Hayek or Bjorn Lomborg, and have found themselves arguing from the outside inward. But by sharing just enough of the prevailing assumptions of their times, they have been allowed entry into worlds where you and I would be barred.

Thus it was Orwell the man of the left who skewered the idea of socialist revolution in Animal Farm, and who depicted the inner feeling of totalitarianism  in 1984. If he had not shared enough of the assumptions of the Left to get close to them, indeed to go fight the fascists in Spain, he would never have seen the Soviets executing the anarchist POUM militia in the Spanish civil war. He would never have shared enough of the socialist ideal to take seriously the betrayal of that ideal by Stalin and his regime. To a capitalist free trade liberal (hence conservative)  such as myself, the fact that socialists are envious little swine , and that communists are trying with all their might to become  social insects and to force you to join this experiment, so that you no longer think but just obey scent glands or something, is merely an observed fact.

So it was in that spirit that I at first perused and then devoured Lovelock’s  “The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning”. The more I read the more I wanted to have the fellow over for a drink.

• he has no use for “greens”; he thinks they vastly underestimate the problem of global warming;
• he has no use for the computer modellers; they fail to make observations of fact and can predict nothing;
• he thinks capitalism will adapt to green ideology by promoting vastly wasteful and stupid windmills and other green energy systems;
• He praises Nigel Lawson, the former British finance minister,  and his other geochemist scientific critics;
• He thinks it is folly for Britain not to rely extensively on the safe  energy of nuclear reactors;
• Most reasearch into the chemical dangers of this or that are spurious; our instruments are so sensitive that they can measure concentrations millions of times lower than that which can cause damage;
• The IPCC has failed to account even for the current climate, let alone the future one;
• the basis of his belief that global warming is happening is that sea levels are rising. All the atmospheric science is basically piffle, in his view.

“The sea level rises for two reasons only: from ice on land that melts and from the expansion of the ocean as it warms”. He has a chart at page 27 showing that the sea level has risen 8 centimeters from 1970 to 2007.

There are many rasons why a skpetic of man-caused global warming would want to read Lovelock. He is fair. He is honest. He has been proven right about many things. He thinks broadly, writes well, and though he may be wrong, he is possibly quite right. As regards the Gaia hypothesis, I suspect it will thrive long after Dawkin’s selfish gene metaphor has been consigned to the pile of reductionist twaddle. Regardless, Lovelock reveals himself the kind of person you would want over for a bottle of wine and maybe  to share a steak. The conversation would be frank, fascinating, and erudite, and he would be open to contrary thinking.

I said previously that the honest argument about the long form census was essentially that

• it would make government less effective. It would do so by making the gathering of data less accurate, less statistically significant,  and less useful.
• By doing so it would make government less intrusive.

That at least, is the theory.  It has a certain attraction for those of us who fear the power of the state, as I do.

My argument with the libertarian opponents of the LFC is that making government less effective does not accomplish their other, laudable goals. In my view, accomplishing goal number one – less effective government- absolutely fails to accomplish goal number two, less intrusive government.

Here are a couple of columnists with the clarity to argue this point explicitly.

This from Ian Robinson in the Calgary Sun:

What they (those who favour the LFC)  don’t get is that those anachronistic idiots who believe in personal freedom and responsibility think things have already gone terribly, terribly wrong. If we can contrive to throw a monkey wrench into most anything government has planned, we’re standing in line to see who gets to throw it.

We want less government. We certainly want less planning because the more these creatures plan, the less money we have in our pockets to spend on stuff we actually want.

A lot of us never signed up for the degree of insane intrusion that is part of everyday life in this country — an intrusion partly fuelled by census data.

We never expected to see once self-respecting nation states teetering on the edge of bankruptcy — and threatening to bring us all down — because the cancer of big government is sucking so much money from their productive minorities that their economies are imploding.

Filling out a census form has been described as an act of social responsibility and it may well be … if it’s voluntary.

What the sheep don’t get is that it’s also an act of social responsibility to extend your middle finger to government.

It never hurts to remind these leeches they work for us … not the other way around. And without allegiance to that bedrock principle, we’re nothing but serfs.

And that’s a principle a trifle more important than permitting the government to threaten you if you don’t fill out a form

 I agree with every sentiment Ian Robinson expresses. But I think he is doing the equivalent of trying to pick up the Gross National Product with a set of tongs. Of a hundred ways to curb the nanny state, the hundredth least effective is to wreck the statistical basis of understanding the population’s wealth, movements, living patterns, immigration patterns, income distribution, and so forth. It is exactly the argument Bjorn Lomborg makes against the global warming enthusiasts: if you had a hundred things to do to help the planet, reducing green house gases would be the last on the list. In matters of domestic policy, chop taxes, lower expenditure,  pass a law allowing people unequivocally to defend themselves and their families from house intrusions and property loss by all force necessary, fire a few judges by Act of Parliament, legalize private medical care: the list goes on and on.

The inimitable sage of mediaeval Catholic thinking, David Warren, objects to the use of numbers to obscure our understanding of reality.

Let me record in passing how happy I am that the Harper government is getting rid of the “long form” of the census. Or rather, I wish it were doing so entirely: instead it is replacing one of innumerable arbitrary invasions of the citizen’s privacy and freedom with something “voluntary.”

Still, one may hope this will give results so obviously skewed as to be unusable, since a voluntary long form can appeal only to people who enjoy meeting bureaucratic requirements, and we can at least hope that they are unrepresentative of the general population….

I have written before, and from several angles, about the evils that flow not so much from the merely wasteful gathering of statistics, as from the uses to which statistics are put, and the addling of the minds of the users. Few drugs are as debilitating, and even in the course of his narcotic dreams, the drug addict seldom tries to impose his view of reality on the rest of us.

My friend Mr Warren does not merely have an argument with the size and pretensions of the state, he has an argument ith modernity itself: the misuse of science to obscure the truth. Or perhaps, in his terms,  even the proper use of science to obscure the Truth of Revelation.  Very well, David, but I am not alowing you anywhere near the machinery of government, business, or the more prosaic ones found in my toolshed. You would wreck my tools through sheer incompetence, an incompetence founded upon  a profound refusal to contemplate the natural laws and mechanical characteristics on which they are predicated.
And here I return to the argument I made previously, that the opponents think that the government will be less intrusive when it is less knowledgable; that its actions will be less obnoxious to freedom of behaviour and belief when it does not know who you are or what you are doing, as a statistical aggregate [note the vital condition here - statistically].  The argument seems plausible until you examine what we ask out of governments: sewers, highways, medical care, urban planning – and however ineffective , law enforcement. Asking for the same level of services while denying  government (all three levels) the means whereby to deliver them, or to plan for their delivery, does not strike me as sound policy.

Trust

Finally, to make a point on which  Blair Atholl frequently has founded his arguments, the social capital of trust is of great importance. Once trust is exhausted, we are caught in a profound morass. (see Francis Fukuyama’s book of the same name, Trust, for an explanation of the relationship between tyrannical governments and the destruction of social capital, such as trust).  The trust I am speaking of here is the trust Canadians have that our governments are by-and-large well intentioned and persuaded by evidence. It seems to me that the government is shredding that trust to no profit by rasing alarms about the degree of personal intrusion mandated by the long form census. The personal data is jealously guarded by StatsCan and is not available, by law, to any other department or branch of government. The government also seems intent upon signalling that it cares little for evidence in the formulation of policy. We will not get that trust back.

This issue may not resonate for partisans, but it does with the kind of people the Conservatives need to raise them to a majority in Parliament.

http://www.news-gazette.com/news/university-illinois/2010-07-09/instructor-catholicism-ui-claims-loss-job-violates-academic-free

I am not making this up, and when you read the article, it gets worse. The complainant was not actually in the professor’s class.

Apparently everything is a code word for the oversensitive. And code words are forbidden. But what is code for what? Even to ask the question is insensitive.

Please sue the university for big bucks, Kenneth Howell.

It has not taken long for the editorialists to put their fingers on the button: are the Tories suppressing the long form census for purely ideological reasons? And I ask: what ideology? Or is this just know-nothingism?

The reason why this issue has resonated is that it goes to the issue which all sensible people must ask about any government. Do these people actually care to make fact-based policy? Or worse, are the Conservatives “ideological” in the same way that the NDP are ideological?  My feelings trump your facts: the kind of rubbish we conservatives hear so often on global warming, or any other leftward hot-button issue. Or as the Citizen editorial bewails  today, “the increasingly anti-intellectual and anti-science orientation of the government.”

The data derived from the long form census is the basis of most government policy at municipal, provincial and federal levels, as well as private and public sector investment decisions.

The arguments of the know-nothings tend to be that a) privacy is invaded and b) that, by inference, by depriving governments of data they will somehow make better (more conservative) decisions.

The privacy invasion argument is rubbish, for two reasons. First, because Stats Can shares no personal information whatever with other departments, and has never been faulted for improper revelation of personal matters. As the former head statistician  Ivan Fellegi said on the radio, StatsCan is “obsessed” with the security of its data. The agency  is bound by law not to reveal it. Second, because compared to the data that all financial institutions are required to submit to the Department of Finance in relation to any “suspicious” transactions, the data collected in the long-form, such knowing how long it takes you to commute or how many bathrooms the average person has, is utterly without adverse effect on the citizen. The Privacy Commissioner reported three complaints in relation to the long-form census in the past decade. So if all the know-nothings were really concerned about privacy, they have exercised highly selective indignation.

No one has been bold enough actually to state that governments would somehow make better (that is, more conservative) decisions if it were deprived of accurate data. Yet that is the inference one must draw from the arguments the true believers are making. I am unable to elaborate this argument more fully; it cannot be done.  Not knowing what effects your policies are having  will not make those policies go away or cause them to be cheaper to deliver. Not knowing where and to whom services are to be denied or delivered will not increase efficiency.

Take a case dear to conservative hearts: reducing inappropriate immigration. Immigrants are continually doing less well with the passage of time. Their rates of assimilation  and finding jobs have worsened  overall as we change the composition of the immigrant populations away from Europeans. It is evident that, as we increase  immigration from non-European countries, the cultural transitions are harder for many immigrants to make. Mix in Islam and you can foresee massive social problems building up for the future. Does it profit us not to know exactly how badly or well new waves of Third World immigration are doing? I thought so.

The sad truth of the matter is that the know-nothings are as wrong about this issue as the global warming fanatics are about their pet obsession. They share the same tendency to believe something a priori (we are doing something terrible to the planet; all government is excessive) and to marshall the facts to suit the false premise.

They are missing the point that science – real knowledge- is the basis of material and intellectual progress. Knowledge, grounded in accuracy, assisted by diligence, and aided by perseverance, will finally overcome all obstacles, raise ignorance from despair, and produce happiness in the paths of science.

In turning away from science-based policy, the Conservative government is betraying reason, and demonstrating to a skeptical middle ground of Canadians that they should not be trusted with a majority. So to answer my colleague Duggan’s Dew, the statistics issue is vital to the march towards a Conservative majority. And they – we – are providing a stumbling block to that outcome.

Stephen Harper: this is your issue. Do something intelligent.

The federal government’s decision to make voluntary the answering of the long form census is a major policy error in about five  different ways. A decision so fundamentally wrong raised questions about the intelligence of our leadership.
The census is the basic instrument whereon depend a vast number of marketing, social policy, taxation, immigration, construction, business location and health policy questions. You cannot conduct government without adequate data on who lives where, how much money are they earning, what they own, how they get to work, whether they have work, and so forth. The Conservatives propose to suppress the rigorous gathering of data through the long form on spurious grounds of privacy. After the long form becomes a voluntary activity, virtually all data collected will become incomparable to previous, more rigorous data.

The mounting ignorance about the facts of our demography will make government a by-guess-and-by-golly affair. It is as if you turned off the instruments on an aircraft at night and tried to land by dead reckoning. Why would you want to turn off your headlights in a snowstorm?

Ivan Fellegi, the former Dominion Statistician, spoke about this the other day on radio. (You will have to endure the CBC for a few moments.)

His points were:

• The results will be biased because aboriginals, new immigrants, the poor, those with low educational attainment, and the very well off are less likely to respond. This will deprive Canada of important information about social trends such as income polarization. It will eliminate our best source of information about aboriginal Canadians, immigrants, and minority language groups.
• Municipalities and provinces will lose their main source of planning information for transportation systems, housing, and other local issues.
• The introduction of such a major change will disrupt any comparison from previous censuses, since it will be impossible to know whether a trend is real or simply an artifact of the switch to voluntary reporting.
• The change will deprive private polsters and researchers of the baseline data they use to check the validity of their samples, and adjust them to ensure they accurately reflect the Canadian population.
• The change means we will spend upwards of $100 million to gather unusable data.

I cannot imagine how the federal Cabinet could make so unbelievably, unspeakably stupid a decision. It is anarchistic in effect, if not in motive.

-no polling preceded it

-no consultations preceded it

-no thought preceded it.

The issue is not StatCan: as Fellegi says, it is the impact on the myriad users of this statistical information for every kind of business and governmental purpose.

Is their purpose the deliberate blinding of governments at all levels?  Why would they think blinding government will make it less intrusive , less costly and more effective?

Budddhism.

South Korea has deployed sentry robots capable of detecting and killing intruders along the heavily-fortified border with North Korea, officials said on Tuesday.

Islam.

The People’s Daily, a newspaper produced by China’s ruling communist party, has either been hilariously pranked or has out-reported every news outlet in Afghanistan to secure the scoop of the century. The outlet today reports that the Taliban in Afghanistan is “training monkeys to use weapons to attack American troops.” After 16 years of war and nine years of battling the U.S., the Islamist insurgents have decided to arm monkeys with “AK-47 rifles and Bren light machine guns in the Waziristan tribal region near the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

The Chinese author, who apparently believes that PETA is more influential than the 31 percent of Americans who oppose the Afghan war, tries to explain what’s happening. “Analysts believe that apart from using ‘monkey killers’ to attack the American troops, the Taliban also sought to arouse Western animal protectionists to pressure their governments to withdraw troops from Afghanistan.”

It seems Obama learns something new everyday.  The bombing in Uganda by al Qaeda led him to make this statement.

In an interview earlier today with the South African Broadcasting Corporation to air in a few hours, President Obama disparaged al Qaeda and affiliated groups’ willingness to kill Africans in a manner that White House aides say was an argument that the terrorist groups are racist.

It has taken this long for this citizen-of-the-world to realize that Muslims are racist?  Perhaps he missed this news report from 2004.

A Sunni insurgent in Baghdad has revealed how black British and American soldiers are being targeted by anti-coalition forces.

Abu Mujahed, who used a pseudonym, declared that black soldiers are a particular target. “To have Negroes occupying us is a particular humiliation,” said the Sunni who also works in a Government ministry.

He told the Guardian reporter, Jason Burke: “Some-times we aborted a mission because there were no Negroes.”

And this guy is suppose to be intelligent and, given his background, knowledgeable about cultural norms of the world?   Perhaps NASA can give the Muslims some sensitivity training.

The White House  tosses NASA administrator Charles Bolden under the bus and flees from his presidentially-assigned  “outreach to Muslim nations” mission so fast, they’re red-shifting:

American diplomats concerned they’re being replaced by NASA employees, breathe easy: The Space agency and its administrator, Charles Bolden, are not responsible for reaching out to the Muslim world after all.

[...]

… White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Monday, “That was not his task, and that’s not the task of NASA.”

Having taken only one week to achieve, this reversal may be the fastest Obama initiative yet.

I refer you to the texts of the BC Ministry of Education BC Performance Standards – Social Responsibility: A Framework . I cannot print the PDF versions here so I ask your indulgence to open them up and compare to this posting.

Take, for example, the program for grades 8 to 10. Any of the age-related curricula will suffice.

Go to the quick scale on page 139 and look under “exercising democratic rights and responsibilities”.

See how the desired criteria are

1. oriented to agreeability and conformity
2. require the teacher to make very precise judgments of character on a host of behaviours being shown by the children in her classroom;
3. and therefore are biased against males.

There are several acepted criteria for the measure of human psychological differences, summarized under the acronym GOCASE. Each criterion produces its own Bell curve, and each is independent of the other. For a discussion of this, please read Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior, by Geoffrey Miller.

G – general intelligence

O – openness

C – conscientiousness

A – agreeability

S – stability

E – extroversion

Two of these criteria are sex-linked. That is to say, males and females charcteristically differ on them. They are agreeability and stability. Males are more stable than females and less agreeable. Sorry, that is just the way it is. Now, return to our BC Ministry of Education judgement guidelines.

Under the title of “Exercising democratic rights and responsibilities” the worst performer is the kid who:

• tends to be egocentric and apathetic; displays little sense of community or responsibility for others

The next one up the hierarchy is one who

• shows some sense of of communitymindedness; may go along with positive actions organized by others, but without much commitment

And finally, Miss Goody Two-Shoes. He who fully meet expectations:

• shows a sense of responsibility and communitymindedness; increasingly interested in taking action to improve the world

The supreme one is she who:

• shows a strong sense of communitymindedness and accountability; can describe and work toward an ideal future for the world

The ideal student is a social policy activist. There is an explicitly political agenda to mark students according as they have plane to improve the world: abolish poverty, stop greenhouse gas accumulation, and so forth. A little Craig Kielburger.

The ideal student speaks out for “diversity and human rights” (see the set of boxes just above the ones cited here). In a former age or political clime they would speak for the brotherhood of man or the supremacy of the Aryan race, or the class struggle, or the reality of the Holy Trinity, or white Christian civilization, fair play and God save the Queen. Today the slogans are diversity and human rights. Why not uniformity and our duty to the country? Silly question. These words summarize the left agenda, which is instructing the little monsters of BC to turn into good socialist tattletales and agreeable conformists.

I am not saying that the students of British Columbia should act like junior Somali warlords. That is plainly a dysfunctional society and the children from it need to be socialized.

But I hear not a word about manliness. I see not a word about the virtues that make men they are, and to which boys should be taught to aspire. The whole program seems directed to inculcating uniformity, obedience, the mouthing of cant platitudes, and the handling of all disputes by girly behaviour rather than a punch-up.

I cannot imagine a male worth his salt who would not rebel against this claptrap. Or, as most likely happens, children realize they are living in a kind of benign dictatorship, and believe exactly the opposite of what Mrs. Lois Thoughtright of the BC Ministry of Education and her minions  try to teach them.

___________________________________________________________

The BC Ministry of Education describes these standards as “voluntary” in its introduction.

The BC performance standards for Social Responsibility have been developed for voluntary use in BC schools. They describe the professional judgments of a significant number of BC educators about standards and expectations for social responsibility, and they provide a context within which teachers, students, and families can examine aspects of social responsibility in their schools.

The categories of behaviour under observation are as follows:

CONTRIBUTING TO THE CLASSROOM AND SCHOOL COMMUNITY

• sharing responsibility for their social and physical environment
• participating and contributing to the class and to small groups

SOLVING PROBLEMS IN PEACEFUL WAYS

• arguments respectfully, and considering others’ views
• managing conflict appropriately, including presenting views and
• using effective problem-solving steps and strategies

VALUING DIVERSITY AND DEFENDING HUMAN RIGHTS

• treating others fairly and respectfully; showing a sense of ethics
• recognizing and defending human rights

EXERCISING DEMOCRATIC RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES

• knowing and acting on rights and responsibilities (local, national, global)
• articulating and working toward a preferred future for the community, nation, and planet—a sense of idealism

Prime Minister Trudeau used to walk over to the Governor General’s at Rideau Hall every Wednesday when they were both in town and have a little chat. We never knew whether the briefing notes prepared for their meeting had any relevance to their real discussions. But they did talk to each other, in keeping with Bagehot’s dictum that the rights of the sovereign were “to be consulted, to advise and to warn.” I have difficulty imagning that this practice has continued under some of the succeeding Governors General and Prime Ministers.

With the appointment of David Johnston to the Vice-Regalship, we can see the re-establishment of this useful tradition. Stephen Harper can cross Sussex Avenue by the traffic circle outside the GG’s, wander up the tree-lined avenue, up the steps and into the Governor General’s library where they can have a drink and talk politics, or watch a game on the tube. The Governor General has the best job in Ottawa, and the cushiest digs.

What kind of advice willl David Johnston give? Very shrewd advice. Johnston is a Presbyterian to start with, and I generally ascribe to Presbyterians a high degree of conscientiousness coupled with a desire to do good. Johnston has been so careful in his announcements that no one can figure out whether he is a Liberal or a Tory (I suspect a Liberal). And surviving the raising of five daughters requires intense political skills, which you would understand if you have ever fathered one, let alone five.

Johnston already gave the speech which would define his term when he alluded to David Hackett Fischer’s recent book on Samuel de Champlain, the founder of New France. Fischer’s book has been a raging success among various portions of the intelligentsia this past year. Quoting from him on the subject of Champlain’s tolerant attitudes was a brilliant, apt move by Professor Johnston, hereafter, His Excellency.

It is a choice which brings credit on the person chosen, the chooser, and the office. Bravo to all of you!

Under the supreme direction of the Prime Minister Harper the country is drifitng into the state where adults are in charge of its vital political institutions.

When you use the Internet, you do not need prior government permission. When you broadcast, you do, and you become subject to myriad rules regarding Canadian content. Also vast fines for broadcasting without a licence. So it is essential that the Courts not classify the activities of Internet service providers, as well as you and me, as “broadasting”.

The CRTC referred the issue to the Federal Court of Appeal for a decision. The answer came back from Mr. Justice Noel:

The answer to the reference question is as follows: Retail Internet service providers  (ISPs) do not carry on, in whole or in part, “broadcasting undertakings” subject to the Broadcasting Act, S.C. 1991, c. 11 when, in their role as ISPs, they provide access through the Internet to “broadcasting” requested by end-users.

The importance of this decision is that it makes it much more difficult for some future set of commissioners at the CRTC to decide that the Internet is “broadcasting” and thereby subject it and you, dear reader, to a vast expansion of government licencing of speech. Thank you, Mr. Justice Noel and colleagues Nadon and Dawson on the Federal Court of Appeal.

President Obama orders NASA to help make Muslims happier about their decline in the sciences:

In a far-reaching restatement of goals for the nation’s space agency, NASA administrator Charles Bolden says President Obama has ordered him to pursue three new objectives: to “re-inspire children” to study science and math, to “expand our international relationships,” and to “reach out to the Muslim world.”  Of those three goals, Bolden said in a recent interview with al-Jazeera, the mission to reach out to Muslims is “perhaps foremost,” because it will help Islamic nations “feel good” about their scientific accomplishments.

[...]

“NASA is not only a space exploration agency,” Bolden concluded, “but also an earth improvement agency.”

And so America itself declines from space pioneer to global psychotherapist.

I ask you, who will rid us of this meddlesome priest-king?!

UPDATE

Behold the contrast, a real American President who speaks to the genuine hopes and pride of his nation:

And Dr. Charles Krauthammer hits smartly for six in his rebuke:

Check out this training video employed by the G-20 protestors:

H/T  www.latfh.com

After the 1996 election, Bill Clinton and Bob Dole met in the Oval Office.    Dole protested that Clinton’s attack ads claiming the Republican wanted to harm Medicare were untrue.  Clinton just smiled and said “You gotta do what you gotta do.”  Now it seems Clinton has extended that reasoning to Sen. Byrd.

“He once had a fleeting association with the Ku Klux Klan, what does that mean? I’ll tell you what it means. He was a country boy from the hills and hollows from West Virginia. He was trying to get elected,” former President Bill Clinton said of Sen. Robert Byrd.

You wonder: can it be true? Is this just a right-wing stereotype? Maybe we are being unfair. Maybe we exaggerate. Then comes “Swept from a peaceful protest”. the essay in yesterday’s Globe and Mail by one of  its design editors, Cinders McLeod.

A self-confessed veteran of the anti-Thatcher poll tax riots, she decides to take her children to the G20 demonstrations.:

“I thought since the detention centre was local and far away from the G20 security zone, it would be a gentle introduction into the peaceful art of protest. I cared for the community, I cared for the people who were unjustly detained and I cared that my children cared too. “

“A gentle introduction into the peaceful art of protest”. What a load of hypocritical cant! As if her “caring” justifies her vapid political posturing.

McLeod continues:

“I saw [her daughter] Anya being pushed by one of the group of police. I screamed out her name. They threw the young man next to her to the ground. Diarmid [her son] ran toward the skirmish just as a kind boy pulled Anya out of the policemen’s path. She looked so thin and vulnerable and 14 in her short shorts beside the black, violent swarm.

The front line of protesters sat down again, hands held in the air in peace signs, chanting, “We are peaceful, how ’bout you.”

Someone called out to take care because a line of police officers was approaching from the other end of the street. I had just enough time to take in the notion that we were surrounded when a line of riot police moved in on the crowd. There was smoke and sounds of shooting. Diarmid and Anya ran to us and we all turned to run down a side alley. I felt a punch on my back and calmly thought, “Oh, that’s what a rubber bullet feels like.”

We found our way to the nearest street and headed for home. Diarmid and Anya walked side by side, all sibling rivalry forgotten. They now had a common enemy: injustice. They knew the police had a job to do, but what they had witnessed wasn’t it.

According to McLeod, the reason for showing up at the detention centre was,

“And I didn’t feel good about teaching my children that we should just sit and let the world be interpreted to us by TV. Did good citizens stay home and mimic the broadcasters or endeavour to find the truth out for themselves?”

What truth? A riot is a riot. Police will act brutally or fairly, but they will act to suppress it. And this was the truth you bring your children to?

Is bringing your teenage children to what obviously will be a riot considered a normal part of educating your children?  Would you expose your children to the threat of tear gas, rubber bullets, truncheons, the rough behaviour of cops suppressing a riot, for any reason? for any reason less than revolution against tyranny? Under what conditions would you parents out there bring your children to a G20 demonstration?  If you are Cinders Mcleod, the answer seems to be: knowing they will not be shot, truncheoned, beaten, or otherwise murdered, but also knowing they will get their blood up against the cops. A good indoctrination in becoming a leftist.