Book reviews in the WSJ:
1) America’s Enduring Ideal
Jeffrey Sachs is only the latest in a long line of thinkers to reject the values of our commercial republic.
2) Burying the Hatchet
The long, arduous and incomplete process of civilizing humankind and suppressing its most violent impulses.
Solar-power equipment manufacturer Stirling Energy Systems Inc. has filed for bankruptcy, adding to a wave of troubles in the solar industry amid soft demand, falling prices and difficulty raising money. [… ] Both [of the company’s plants] were sited on public land in California and obtained fast-track construction pemits from the Obama administration.
Mead notes …
But there’s another factor behind the failure of so many Obama administration initiatives in this field. Because alternative energy generation is expensive and inefficient, it requires some combination of subsidies, high energy prices and forced purchases to make these investments pay off.
I remember the days when SDA was a lonely incandescent bulb of green energy truth, lighting a path through the blogosphere wilderness. Nowadays, it seems everyone’s jumping on the bandwagon. Still, when you read the word “investments” in a sentence like that above, one realizes there’s still work to be done. (h/t Instapundit)
This past Thursday, an interesting fact was revealed in Ottawa: The NDP doesn’t care about the welfare and prosperity of private sector union members.
A forum was held, run jointly by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and Canada’s building trades unions. It focused on the almost certain lack of skilled workers in the oil industry in the near future. The goal of the forum was to urge politicians to increase apprenticeships for skilled trades as well as increase immigration of accredited skilled workers.
“Conservative MPs showed up, Liberal MPs were there, but not even one NDP MP showed up,” said Christopher Smillie, a senior adviser for the Building and Construction Trades Department of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), Canadian Office. He represents 450,000 construction union members across Canada.
The Calgary Herald’s Licia Corbella has the full story.
So why didn’t any NDP MPs show up? Because their political masters these days are extreme left-wing zealots, all of whom subscribe to environmental extremism and the destruction of Canada’s oil industry. If I were a private sector union member I’d have a difficult time convincing myself why I would want to vote for the federal NDP, a party that has shown nothing but disdain for me and my family.
Not what one might think:
William Watson: U.S. created Trudeau
…the option of picking up and moving to the United States no longer really exists for most Canadians. The first legal limits on entry to the United States came in the mid-1920s, though we were essentially exempted from them. But in 1965, the United States changed its immigration laws and did make Canadians part of a small annual quota for migrants from the western hemisphere. Turnabout was fair play: we had increased our restrictions on American immigration in 1962.
In Closing the 49th Parallel, a fascinating new paper in the academic journal Canadian Public Policy, the Canadian economists Stanley Winer of Carleton University and James Davies of the University of Western Ontario argue that the Americans’ decision to foreclose the possibility of an easy escape to the United States created a captive tax base for the Canadian politicians of the 1960s and 1970s and lowered the political cost to them from raising taxes and building up the Canadian welfare state…
Aw, just look at him, he’s the spitting image of his mother and mother:
The lesbian parents of an 11-year-old boy who is undergoing the process of becoming a girl last night defended the decision, claiming it was better for a child to have a sex change when young.
Thomas Lobel, who now calls himself Tammy, is undergoing controversial hormone blocking treatment in Berkeley, California to stop him going through puberty as a boy.
Infants be warned: you’d better choose your first words very, very carefully:
The mothers say that one of the first things Thomas told them when he learned sign language aged three – because of a speech impediment – was, ‘I am a girl’.
(Addendum: Read Richard Fernandez’s September 29 post at PJM and, especially, his comments (as “Wretchard”) below the article.)
In tonight’s Tippity amusement English playwright and composer (and, it was later revealed, Bletchley Park-trained WWII spy) Noël Coward sings a bouncy little ditty called There Are Bad Times Just Around The Corner.
Lyrics here.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
