Barrel Strength

Today we raise a toast to Paul Benoit, the airport manager. It was he who brought the Ottawa airport construction to completion on time and under budget. He has succesfully overseen an investment of half a billion in the Ottawa airport. Its revenues rose from $30 milion in the 1990s to $85 million today.

This is what they said about him:

“When Paul first accepted that position, the airport looked like something you’d find in the third world,” says Jim Durrell, former Ottawa mayor and past Chair of the Airport Authority’s board. “It was losing money and it was an embarrassment. Now, thanks in large part to Paul’s leadership, it is recognized as being among the finest airports on the planet.”

Last month, Airports Council International, an industry association representing airports in 179 countries and territories around the world, announced that Ottawa was ranked first in North America among all airport sizes and second in the world in customer service.

“Paul thinks like an entrepreneur,” says current Airport Authority chair Raymond Brunet. “And not just when it comes to customer service. We’ve invested more than half a billion dollars in building and infrastructure projects in the past few years and it was his job to make sure those projects were on track. In fact, they were often done faster and at less cost than anticipated. That’s a testament to his leadership and ability to motivate people.”

I met him once. He is modest and wholly unassuming. Would it be possible to:

• make him a Companion of the Order of Canada?
• make him deputy minister of transport?
• raise a life-size bronze statue of him in the airport?

Anyone who has passed thorugh the old and new Ottawa airports will be inclined to answer all three questions affirmatively. Well done, sir!

The depth of acceptance of the climate change hoax (yes it’s changing, no we are not causing it, and no we should not live in North Korea even if we were) is exemplified by the American philosophy and bio-ethics professor Matthew Liao. His proposal is that we consider engineering people to be smaller so that our carbon footprint in less.

Which reminds me of the old expression, when I hear the word “bio-ethicist”, I reach for the safety catch of my Glock.

The professor speaks:

“The reason we are even considering these solutions is to prevent climate change, which is a really serious problem, and which might affect the well being of millions of people including the child. And so in that context, if on balance human engineering is going to promote the well being of that particular child, then you might be able to justify the solution to the child.”

I count at least four very large unjustifiable assumptions buried in that piece of hubris.

• that the measures, if undertaken, would be effective for their stated goals, reducing climate change
• that the problem of climate change is really serious
• that, on balance, human engineering of the kind proposed would promote the benefit of the child
• that the child would accept the justification.

A real philosopher would probably find several more. David Stove, come back from the dead!

I am constantly reminded by drivel of this sort of the Finnish deep ecologist, Pentti Linkola, who frankly promotes human extermination as the solution to ecological damage.

At least Linkola is clear, and believes what he says, and not just writing to advance his career in the philosophy department. On the other hand, perhaps articles of this sort are like the proposals for the killing of infants once born. Are they spoofs? Or are they the philosophical precursors to exterminationists?

I heard Eric Duhaime today and it was a confirmation of everything I have been saying about Quebec, from the mouth of a pure laine.

Duhaime, together with Tasha Kheiriddin and Matthieu Bock-Cote, provided a devastating critique of the current state of Quebec.

It’s the demography, stupid. Every figure of demographic decline leads to an inversion between the number of people working, and thus paying taxes, and the number of pension recipients. Duhaime was claiming that shortly Quebec will experience two people working for seven pensionaries.There were other statistics of like nature that showed that Quebec is more screwed than it dares to imagine.

The national socialist experiment – as I call it – which has been driving Quebec since 1960 is in its last stages, unsupportable economically because, in essence, the current generations of Quebecois have been bribed for or against separation at the expense of future generations coming into maturity. The older generations has eaten their seed corn: that was the message. They have failed to reproduce; they have failed to attract the level of economic activity that would sustain their tribe in the absence of self-regeneration, and they have been made maximally dependent upon governments, including the one now in Ottawa.

Voting for the NDP in the last election was a rational strategy to seek an English-Canadian electoral partner so that the subsidies might continue.

The happy message from the three of them was that the social democratic experiment on which Quebec launched itself 50 years ago is in its last stages. What will replace it is up for grabs. As the speakers made clear, basic questions remain to be solved. The very idea of a left-right distinction has been suppressed by the clamor over federalist versus separatist. That an economy and society might run with less governmental oversight is not the obvious demarcation of political views. Everything has taken place within the nationalist bubble.

The expose  occurred at the  Manning Centre’s political confab in Ottawa, which was a moderately entertaining collection of broad church conservatives under the genial but exigent leadership of Senior Statesman Preston Manning.

Consider the relative influence of Preston Manning versus Robert Stanfield and you will see why monuments will be raised to Presto, and airports named after him. He was Moses, not Joshua. He led the people out of the desert to the promised land, but it was Joshua who took Jericho by storm.

Georgetown Law student and reproductive rights activist Sandra Fluke testified to the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee last month that contraception can cost a law student $3,000 over three years which some of the students cannot afford.

Let us examine the cost issue first. Planned Parenthood, a well known supporter of abortion and a frequent target of anti-abortion groups, suggests that the monthly cost for birth control pill is “about $15–$50 each month” which translates to a maximum of $600 per year. Clearly Fluke is not talking about using the birth control pill when identifying the cost. Is it possible she is talking about using condoms? The American Pregnancy Association suggests the cost of condoms “ranges from as little as 20¢ to $2.50 each“. Obviously one wouldn’t expect a student from a prestigious university such as Georgetown to use 20¢ condoms so let us use the $2.50 figure.  At $1,000/yr that translates to 400 condoms per year,  or about 1 per weekday and 3 per weekend. Fluke should be commended on balancing such a busy social calendar with active academic studies.

On a similar note a reader on another blog suggested this.

We all know that the medical community has recognized the benefits of red wine for the human heart. Resveratrol is found in the tannins apparently. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. Therefore I think it is high time that insurance policies cover red wine. Does the Obama administration have any idea what a good bottle of cabernet sauvignon costs? I spend at least $3000 a year on red wine a year and it’s breaking the bank.

Indeed, ubi est mia?

One of the attributes of the conservative mind, in the complimentary and accurate sense of theat term, is a humility before the unknown, and a tendency to recognize the fallibility of human reasoning. It is the hesitation to light a fire under David Suzuki, however pleasant the prospect, not merely because it would violate his human rights, but that we might well be wrong, really wrong, about global warming and man’s role in it.

It is in this vein that I refer you to the obituary of James Q. Wilson, the eminent American scholar, by Kay Hymowitz in the generally excellent City Journal.

Hymowitz writes:

Jim Wilson, of course, was Breitbart’s opposite, a courtly sort defined by civility and caution in both his personal manner and his work. Every idea was tapped, held up to the light, examined from all sides. Even when pronounced valuable, he held it gently, with a gentleman’s grace. “We don’t know” was one of my favorite Wilsonisms. He used it often: “We don’t know the right number” of people who use guns for self-defense. “Which genes help create which political attitudes? Right now, we don’t know.” “We don’t know how to convert theory into practice.”

In this way he reminded all of us, but particularly policymakers, that science was less a body of settled laws than a disciplined gesture at the unknown. Real science required us to untangle feelings and evidence. Judging from tributes after his death from liberal social scientists who had been his students, in this respect he was heard even in an academy that so often disagreed with him.

Some time ago I said we have no stake in letting Sunni fanatics take over Syria. They used to march through the streets shouting “Allawites to the grave, Christians to Beirut!”. Now that the Sunnis are getting the shit kicked out of them, the Western press is doing its usual human rights number. Oh the poor people of Syria, oppressed by that evil Assad! Syria shows us how governments need to behave in the Middle East if they wish to remain in power. Libya’s Ghadaffi shows us the folly of not exterminating your opponents, or of being too weak to do so.

The politics of people in 1500s Europe was similar. The Kings of France invested, besieged, and overwhelmed towns that had tax revolts, then hanged half the male citizens down to the age of 14 years old. Assad is pussy-footing compared to the behaviour of European monarchs of yore. The Middle East is in the same stage we were during the wars of religion in the 1600s.

We are judging Syrian governance, a society at the stage we were in 1500 or 1600, by the standards we like to think we have in 2012. These people have not learned compromise or democratic behaviour. They would not know what it was; they would assume it was the manifestation of weakness, and press for more. Assad is dealing with his population on the level to which they have evolved; he can do more, except leave power and watch his tribesmen be slaughtered in the wake of a Sunni victory.

Taki has this analysis. Read it, and get cynical fast.

Please recall the Shah of Iran’s famous dictum: “When my people behave like Swedes, then I shall behave like the King of Sweden.”

Global warming for me is a personal affair. It is March 5. The spring equinox is less than two weeks away. The sun is going down these days about 5:15, so despite the cold, people’s moods are happier with increased sunshine.

I write from deep in the country. It will be -17C tonight, or about zero Fahrenheit. I have two wood stoves on the go, which are gradually warming my modest country house. As the stoves blaze, I think of all the wood I cut, split, stack, re-stack and take in every evening and day to fill the wood bins.

If you had to fill your lamps with oil, and clean the wicks every day, you would understand better your consumption of energy. Same with drawing water from the well. As Matt Ridley reminds us in his brilliant book The Rational Optimist, each of us has more servants working for him than Louis XIV in his splendor at Versailles. They are measured in kilowatts, and gallons of fuel. They draw our water and heat our baths, and bring the water up from the basement, and take it away again when we are finished. They clean our dishes. They wash and dry our clothes. The average woman in the 19th century could not have run her household without at least one servant girl. We have hundreds of servants, and they do not have to be fed more than a few hundred bucks a month.

My take-away from Ridley’s book is this: servitude has been eliminated because we are burning fossil and nuclear fuels. It is that simple. The progress of the past several centuries is purely a matter of having more energy at our disposal. I think the increased prosperity we have found of late in the past three centuries has had enormous beneficial effects everywhere, in all human relationships.

An idea that intrigues me is the relationship of increasing prosperity, the subject of Matt Ridley’s book, with another large scale phenomenon occurring almost simultaneously with the rise of prosperity, the reduction of violence.

As so ably discussed by Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of our Nature, violence has been observed to decline in all human relationships, nearly everywhere. Interpersonal, intercommunal, interstate, intertribal, and interfamilial violence has declined dramatically since the 1500s. The evidence shows that, despite what Pinker calls the hemoclysms of World Wars one and Two, the trend in the reduction of violence is observed everywhere (except in the Islamic world). In short, our manners are gentling.

The basic thesis of Pinker, freely credited to Norbert Elias, is that once political authority became established, the nobles were gradually prohibited from waging war upon each other. Manners at court, where the nobles dined with the king,  spread out to manners in the rest of society. The traders who dealt with the nobility learned to say please and thank you and not spit into the soup, and above all, to refrain from slaying one another on a whim. Eventually the milk-maid and the tanner were observed to say please and thank you, not just to their social betters, but to each other. The thrust of Pinker’s book is that the gradual, centuries-long gentling of human manners is reaching an occasionally absurd end-point, but that the rights revolutions are a result of much greater empathy being nourished in modern society for former underdogs.

For me, there are three or four books that set the boundaries of debate. Ridley’s The Rational Optimist and Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature are two of them. They establish their factual case so thoroughly that I am just not willing to pay attention to those who dispute their conclusions unless the contrarians have done as much homework as the people they contend with.

In a nutshell:

Matt Ridley: Prosperity is actually increasing because we are burning more fossil fuels.

Steven Pinker: Violence of all kinds is decreasing because we established adequate political authority that began the suppression of violence among all social classes some centuries ago. The gentling of manners continues once this virtuous cycle had been established, and its range has expanded from less murder to fewer deaths in war, proportionately to population, in every century since the 1600s.

Here are a few more books of the same ilk:

Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve: Intelligence is largely hereditary and is the most important factor in personal success and failure. Intelligence differs among people of the same race, and between races. This is as proven a fact as anything is social science.

Charles Murray Human Accomplishment: Murray argues on the basis of statitical methods that most of human progress in science and the arts was accomplished by an incredibly small number of white men, concentrated in various times first in northern Italy, later in the Low Countries and Britain. It is the complete rebuttal to the obloquy of “dead white males” from the humanities departments. In short, by way of example, he argues that Michael Faraday contributed more to science than the entirety of Islamic or Indian civilizations. It is a stake driven into the heart of political correctness, and a vital education in the truth.

Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Everything we know now about how a small band of people left Africa 30,000 years ago and became every other race on the planet by colonizing it in a process of adaptation to new climatic challenges.

Time to load more logs into the stoves.

The Australian federal government is proposing to set up an agency to regulate print and electronic media.

The review, led by former judge Ray Finkelstein,  concluded that a new regulator empowered by federal legislation would give complainants a faster way to seek redress such as corrections, clarifications or apologies.

“There must be some effective means of raising standards of journalism and of making the media publicly accountable,” the report said. “What the media have lost sight of is that they accepted the idea of press regulation by having set up the Australian Press Council to make a positive contribution to the development of journalistic standards.”

In other words, the press lost its right to object when it accepted an industry-funded Press Council to handle complaints.

As I suspected, the move is in the guise of protecting the industry from competition. When your business model is obsolete, protect it by legislating competition away. The government’s rationale was stated as:

Announcing the Terms of Reference for the Inquiry, Senator Conroy acknowledged the pressures brought about by the advent of digital technologies and the 24 hour news cycle were threatening the traditional business models that support the essential role of the media in our democratic society.

Senator Conroy noted that this is a worldwide phenomenon, and one the Australian Government is already addressing through its Convergence Review.

“The Convergence Review is taking a broad and considered approach to a range of regulatory issues across the broadcasting, telecommunications and radio-communications sectors,” Senator Conroy said.

“The Media Inquiry I am announcing today will focus on print media regulation, including online publications, and the operation of the Press Council. [14 September 2011].

Blogs with 15,000 clicks a month fall into the jurisdiction of the Press Agency.

The plan seems to be directed to keep kiddie porn and gambling sites out of Australia, but the range of banned sites is much wider.

“An earlier version of the Government’s top-secret list of banned sites was leaked on to the web in March, revealing the scope of the filtering could extend significantly beyond child porn.

“About half of the sites on the list were not related to child porn and included a slew of online poker sites, YouTube links, regular gay and straight porn sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites, websites of fringe religions such as satanic sites, fetish sites, Christian sites, the website of a tour operator and even a Queensland dentist.”

The small number of landing sites for international traffic makes Internet filtering by Australia  easily feasible.

Obama, June 2008

Obama: ‘If They Bring a Knife to the Fight, We Bring a Gun’

Obama, March 2012

Obama Likens Himself To Gandhi And Nelson Mandela

I leave this country for a week and it goes to hell. I swear. In the beautiful Caribbean Island where I enjoyed a week of bliss, I hear of Jessie Sansome, arrested, strip-searched, while his wife is prevented from seeing him and the kids removed by the morons of the children’s aid society. As you well recall, Sansome’s daughter had drawn a picture of a gun which her daddy used to fight monsters and bad guys.

CTV’s legal analyst, Steve Skurka, wrote that:

It is difficult to conceive of a clearer case of an unlawful arrest. There was no basis to even remotely justify it. A discreet inquiry would have disclosed that Sansone had a toy gun in his house.

So tell me, friends, when did you lose confidence in the intelligence, reasonableness, and fair-mindedness of our police forces? When did you begin to think they don’t work for the taxpayer? When did the naive confidence you used to have in their professionalism evaporate?

• Was it the murder of the Polish guy, Robert Dziekanski, at the Vancouver airport? Was it the inability to see that a serial killer was murdering whores at Willy Pickton’s farm? Their unwillingness to investigate? The repression by senior staff  of policemen and policewomen who thought something was going on? Or was it the suppression of protests by the Ontario Provincial Police of white people at Caledonia and the police’s standing by at the murder, beatings, robbery, intimidation and terrorizing being committed by Indians in the name of spurious land claims?
• Was it the inability of the police to stop criminals from vandalizing  downtown — including their own police cars — Toronto during the G8 conference, but their unrestrained head-bashing of peaceful protestors?

The cumulative sense that Canadians have is that their police forces are no longer working for them, that they have been infected with political correctness, that they no longer can distinguish a citizen defending his life or property from a criminal from the criminal invading and stealing.

Why is this?

The answer, at least part of it, is that the law has made the defence of one’s home by firearms nearly impossible. Illegal, in short.  The police will always seek to monopolize their use of arms. Using firearms to defend yourself is a threat to their would-be monopoly.

The reason why the cops cannot distinguish the citizen from the criminals that both, in their eyes, are criminals, and the law says so. One lives at a fixed address and pays taxes. The other does not. Whom are you going to bust? The thugs or ne’er-do-wells who try to rob your home are not the threat to the cops, it is the armed citizen.

The second reason is that they do as they are told by the Attorneys-General of this country. Whether siding with Indian lawlessness at Caledonia, or suppressing the ability to defend one’s home or business, you must remember that they are obeying orders of high-ups. These people are obsessed with the possibility that someone, somewhere might seek to commit violence in defence of what is right. That would break the state’s monopoly of making moral decisions.

A lot of violence is amateur enforcement of laws or important social norms.  The authorities seem bound and determined to suppress the natural moral instincts of people because they do not trust us to make proper moral decisions about right and wrong. They need to be made for us, by them.

It is evident that a great deal of social and attitudinal reform will be needed to let them know that they work for us, and not we, them.

The recent Greek debt deal brought forth this piece of economic clarity.

“In my simple mind, it seems crazy,” said Dionysius Tsoukalas, 35, as he served customers at a downtown Athens coffee bar. “They took off 100 billion, but now we took a new loan for 130 billion. Why would we do that? It’s crazy.”

When considering a response to protests against burning of four Korans that were used by the detainees to forward coded messages containing intelligence, which by the way is a desecration in itself, one should ask why there were no protests in the following cases where Korans were obviously destroyed as well.

September 2011: Suicide attack at gate of Shiite Mosque in Afghanistan near Pakistan border, 6 dead.

December 2011: Suicide Attack on Shiite Mosque in Kabul, up to 60 dead

August 2011: Suicide Bomber inside Baghdad’s biggest Sunni Mosque. Between 12 and 29 dead, more wounded.

August 2011: Suicide Bomber inside Pakistani mosque during prayers. 43 dead, over 100 wounded.

Understanding of this conundrum will go a long way in formulating a correct response to Islam.

Have the Europeans finally concluded that the “Anglo-Saxon” path is the way to go? You decide based on this interview with Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank (emphasis added).

WSJ: Austerity means different things, what’s good and what’s bad austerity?

Draghi: In the European context tax rates are high and government expenditure is focused on current expenditure. A “good” consolidation is one where taxes are lower and the lower government expenditure is on infrastructures and other investments.

WSJ: Bad austerity?

Draghi: The bad consolidation is actually the easier one to get, because one could produce good numbers by raising taxes and cutting capital expenditure, which is much easier to do than cutting current expenditure. That’s the easy way in a sense, but it’s not a good way. It depresses potential growth.

WSJ: Which do you think are the most important structural reforms?

Draghi: In Europe first is the product and services markets reform. And the second is the labour market reform which takes different shapes in different countries. In some of them one has to make labour markets more flexible and also fairer than they are today. In these countries there is a dual labour market: highly flexible for the young part of the population where labour contracts are three-month, six-month contracts that may be renewed for years. The same labour market is highly inflexible for the protected part of the population where salaries follow seniority rather than productivity. In a sense labour markets at the present time are unfair in such a setting because they put all the weight of flexibility on the young part of the population.

WSJ: Do you think Europe will become less of the social model that has defined it?

Draghi: The European social model has already gone when we see the youth unemployment rates prevailing in some countries. These reforms are necessary to increase employment, especially youth employment, and therefore expenditure and consumption.

Every conservative should be concerned about an over-reaching state. So should every liberal. Bad law, sloppy drafting, and over-reaching objectives abound. Combine badly-written law with zealous prosecutions and you end up with Leroy Smickle, the fellow who was caught in his underwear holding a handgun as the police charged in looking for his cousin.

The Globe reports:

“When police broke down the apartment door, Mr. Smickle was reclining on a sofa operating a webcam. He had the gun in one hand and his laptop computer in the other.”

Madame Justice Anne Molloy refused to imprison Smickle  for three years for the crime of being caught with a loaded restricted weapon posing before his Internet camera in his apartment, as police charged through looking for his cousin.

The kind of people who are outraged at the Liberals for their gun-storage laws should be outraged by the Conservatives and their mandatory minimum-sentence for gun crime. If we rise in wrath about zealous leftie prosecutors seeking to make it impossible to locate, unlock, load, and use a firearm in time to save oneself from housebreakers, can we be indifferent to the likelihood that those same prosecutors will use the gun-crime laws to persecute legitimate gun usage further?

The Globe continues:

The judge noted that bad drafting was partially to blame for the legal straitjacket she found herself in. She took issue with a discrepancy in the firearms law, passed in 2008, which allows a judge to impose a more lenient sentence should the Crown choose to proceed summarily with a charge – an option that includes no jury and swifter resolution.

She said that if the Crown instead proceeds by indictment, as it did in Mr. Smickle’s case, the minimum sentence automatically becomes three years.

The discrepancy created by the two sentence ranges is so “irrational and arbitrary” that it would shock the community were she to impose the mandatory sentence on Mr. Smickle, Judge Molloy said.

In case you think this is just a question of the Conservatives being wrong, or not, contemplate the source of this next quote:

McGuinty on Tuesday reiterated his support for mandatory minimums for all gun offences.

“The message that we’re sending to all Ontarians is that we treat gun crimes very seriously here,” he said.

When the Conservatives show signs of letting people defend their homes with firearms without fear of prosecution, nanny statists like McGuinty want to use new federal legislation to make it impossible. Connect the dots between “unsafe storage” and “gun crime”.

Do we imagine that a Sunni dictatorship will be more in our interests than an Alawite one?

• After Egypt’s  Revolution resulted in more Christians being abducted, forcibly converted to Islam, and their churches burnt,
• After Medecins sans Frontieres stopped medical services in Libya because they were being used to keep Gadhaffi supporters alive for more torture,
• After the 1979 Shiite Revolution in Iran,which toppled the pro-Western Shah and started this mess;

do you really still think regime change in Syria will be good for us? Good for the Syrian people as a whole? Good for the Sunni majority? What about the Alawites? What about the Christians? The marchers chanted  “Alawites to the grave, Christians to Beirut”. Does anything in recent or ancient history make you believe that will not happen once the Sunnis control the country?

This is just another Arab-Islamic power struggle, fought in the usual way by the usual methods. I further predict that Assad will probably win. Every western power should stay out of it.

Taki has it right:

What is the Syrian uprising all about? That’s an easy one. The Sunni Saudis are financing the Sunnis in Syria to get rid of the governing Alawite clique. The Syrian army is Alawite-led, the Alawites being a minority and an offshoot of Shia Islam. Get it? The Saudis fear Shiite Iran, which is helping Assad. The Sunni-led kleptocracies of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf are posturing and threatening war against Iran’s Shiites and Syria’s Shiite-Alawite regime. It is the game of nations, a fight between Sunnis and Shiites in reality, but I don’t expect many of the Super Bowl-winning team’s defensive linemen to understand it.