… at home:

The federal government is expected to announce new rules Tuesday that would make it more difficult for first-time buyers to enter Canada’s hot housing market.
Sources have told The Canadian Press that Finance Minister Jim Flaherty is ready to move on the issue because of concern Canadians may be taking on too much debt.
Economists have advised the minister the best way to protect Canadians is to institute a debt affordability test in order to qualify for a Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corp. insured mortgage.

… and abroad:

During the January 2010 World Economic Summit in Davos, Switzerland, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the current chairman of the G-20, presented the upcoming agenda for the G-20 and G-8 meetings to be held in Ontario in June. Many were shocked to hear this Conservative leader declare, “We also know markets need governance. For the new global economy, the G-20 is what we have.” Harper went on to speak as an avowed Keynesian committed to a one-world global economy, creating a world “we have been trying to build since 1945”. He went on to warn the world that national self-interest and sovereignty must be opposed to stave off a greater crisis than the current recession. For the next several months leading up to and including the G-20 meetings, Stephen Harper will be attempting to convince the world to find global unity of purpose and adopt what he calls “Enlightened Sovereignty.”

… the speech. (You be the judge)
… some more thoughts here and here.

Opportunity:

The right-front wheel currents continue to be well-behaved. No improvement has been observed yet in the miniature thermal emission spectrometer (Mini-TES) elevation mirror, which continues to be opened regularly to allow cleaning by the wind.

WSJ:

The central contradiction in modern liberal politics is that Otto von Bismarck’s entitlement state for cradle to grave financial security is no longer affordable. The model has reached the limit of its ability to tax private income and still allow enough economic growth to finance its transfer payments.
You can see this in bankrupt Greece, where government spends 52% of GDP; or in California and New York, where the government-employee unions have pushed tax rates to punishing levels and the states still can’t pay their bills. Americans can see that this is where Mr. Obama’s agenda is also taking Washington, and this is why they are rejecting it.

Last week Liberal MP Bob Rae, NDP MP Paul Dewar, and Block MP Paul Crete held a press conference at which they pushed the Conservative government to “act immediately” to bring Omar Khadr home. “It’s in Canada’s interest and it’s in Mr. Khadr’s interest to allow him to be reintegrated into…Canadian society,” Rae said.
Later the same day a group of Muslim leaders, along with one of Khadr’s lawyers, proposed a reintegration plan: upon his return Khadr would live not with his family, who, as this report notes, “had close ties to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden,” but with host families, and he would receive spiritual counseling from leading Muslim clerics.
One of the members of the group proposing the plan for Khadr’s reintegration is Zafar Bangash, the organizer of the recent Toronto area conference at which 9/11 was mocked, the actions of the Toronto 18 were described as “nothing of significance,” and Israelis accused of having allowed the so-called underwear bomber to board the plane.
Joseph Breen, who was at the conference, which was held four days after the reintegration proposal: “(Bangash) said he told police that if protesters were to trespass, ‘I guarantee nothing,’ to which the audience responded with chants of ‘Allahu Akbar.'”
In a 2003 article titled “Far too late to avert a clash of civilizations“, Bangash wrote:

Those who claim otherwise, and try to convince Muslims that the West can be lived with, are – knowingly or unknowingly – serving the purposes of those who are bent on destroying the pristine principles of the divinely appointed and ordained faith.

This, from a man who is part of the group who have a “plan” to help Khadr “become a fully functioning member of the Canadian mosaic.”
(h/t blazingcatfur)

… and hoping the proles don’t remember:

Three big companies quit an influential lobbying group that had focused on shaping climate-change legislation, in the latest sign that support for an ambitious bill is melting away.
Oil giants BP PLC and ConocoPhillips and heavy-equipment maker Caterpillar Inc. said Tuesday they won’t renew their membership in the three-year-old U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a broad business-environmental coalition that had been instrumental in building support in Washington for capping emissions of greenhouse gases.
The move comes as debate over climate change intensifies and concerns mount about the cost of capping greenhouse-gas emissions.

… feel free to put your global-warming-all-hell-breaking-loose news in the comments … it’s getting hard to keep track of all the death spasms.

Less:

Declining fog cover on California’s coast could leave the state’s famous redwoods high and dry, a new study says.
Among the tallest and longest-lived trees on Earth, redwoods depend on summertime’s moisture-rich fog to replenish their water reserves.
But climate change may be reducing this crucial fog cover. Though still poorly understood, climate change may be contributing to a decline in a high-pressure climatic system that usually “pinches itself” against the coast, creating fog, said study co-author James Johnstone, an environmental scientist at the University of California, Berkeley.

More:

The Bay Area just had its foggiest May in 50 years. And thanks to global warming, it’s about to get even foggier.
That’s the conclusion of several state researchers, whose soon-to-be-published study predicts that even with average temperatures on the rise, the mercury won’t be soaring everywhere.

ht

***

On Sunday a conference attended by about 300 people was held at an Islamic centre in Toronto. The National Post’s Joseph Brean describes the festivities:

…the Christmas Day underwear bomber was described as the tool of an Israeli plot; Barack Obama was referred to as “Mr. Black Man”; al-Qaeda was called “the figment of the imagination of the West”; and a video was shown that mocked 9/11 by putting the Muppet Show logo over slow-motion footage of the second plane’s impact, with screams of terror for audio.

The program started with a prayer from the Koran, sung beautifully by a boy in Arabic, and translated to English by another boy who, by his tone, clearly understood its message about the punishment of cities for their depravity.

Seems a bit standoffish, to me…

$2.36 Trillion:

Restrictions on oil and gas drilling will cost the U.S. economy $2.36 trillion through 2029, according to a study requested by state utility regulators and paid for in part by industry-sponsored groups.
Drilling restrictions in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and off the U.S. coastline are blocking access to about nine years’ worth of U.S. oil and gas consumption, according to the report. Among sponsors are the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners and the industry-funded Gas Technology Institute, of Des Plaines, Illinois.

… the details.
Related

… not knowing when enough is enough:

If the idea of talking to reporters about politics during the Olympic Games was Michael Ignatieff’s idea of getting attention, he could at least come up with some original ideas. The only thing more pathetic than a dog standing on the side the road in the pouring rain is Michael Ignatieff’s current attempt to make people turn away from Alexandre Bilodeau so we can listen to more whining about prorogation.
Welcome to February 15, 2010, Mr.Ignateff. It isn’t January anymore, and those Facebook members of the group Canadians against Proroguing Parliament are all currently tuned in to watch Figure skating pairs on television. [I should probably clarify that their wives are making them do this.]

Just wondering … was Mr. Baradar mirandized and lawyered up according to O-policy … or did they play splish splash with the POS if he refused to spill the beans:

The Taliban’s top military commander has been arrested in a joint CIA-Pakistani operation in Pakistan.
Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the No.2 behind Afghan Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar and a close associate of Osama bin Laden, was captured in the southern Pakistani port city of Karachi.
The arrest represents a major victory against the insurgents as U.S. troops push into their heartland in southern Afghanistan.
Baradar was held 10 days ago with the assistance of the United States and ‘was talking’ to his interrogators.

… the details.
As an aside, any guess what the LPC and NDP policy would be with Baradar, given their hair pulling over even the thought of a Taliban being so much as scowled at.

In an article in The Daily Beast, Nigerian activist and Nobel laureate for Literature Wole Soyinka is quoted as saying that England’s openness to other cultures allowed Muslim extremism to flourish in Britain, and that this openness, a direct result of England’s colonial history, evolved naturally into something resembling an insane tractability:

“England is a cesspit. England is the breeding ground of fundamentalist Muslims. Its social logic is to allow all religions to preach openly. But this is illogic, because none of the other religions preach apocalyptic violence. And yet England allows it. Remember, that country was the breeding ground for communism, too. Karl Marx did all his work in libraries there.”

“This is part of the character of Great Britain,” Mr. Soyinka declares. “Colonialism bred an innate arrogance, but when you undertake that sort of imperial adventure, that arrogance gives way to a feeling of accommodativeness. You take pride in your openness.” And so it is, he says, that Britain lets everyone preach whatever they want: It confirms a self-image of greatness.

Denmark’s Torben Hansen sees France’s importation of a large Muslim population as being similarly rooted in a notion of national greatness, albeit the French policy was borne not of a desire to confirm greatness but an insecure need to assert it:

French foreign policy, among other things, lies at the roots of our problems with the aggressive Islamic ideology. Charles de Gaulle had this idea that France should be a bridge between the West and the Arab world. This had to do with a French inferiority complex. They had been humiliated in WW 2, first by Hitler, and then by the US and the Brits who liberated them. So he cooked up this plan for a French-Muslim alliance…. The apparatus of the EU is in many ways a French construction.

Of all the consequences to European politicians’ lack of foresight on immigration, national greatness isn’t one of them. Sovereignty itself is being gnawed away at, most notably in France: in 2006 there were 751 Zones Urbaines Sensibles – or less euphemistically, “places…that the French state does not control.” Europeans’ right to speech is under assault: a Dutch filmmaker was shot and had his throat slit for making a film critical of Islam’s treatment of women, and the Somali-born woman who provided the voiceover for the film was forced into hiding; in Denmark, a one million dollar bounty was placed on the head of a mild-mannered cartoonist.
Similar smaller instances happen on a daily basis. Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian, asserts that this empowered prerogative of Islamists, not just in Europe but worldwide, can be traced directly back to one single event that happened in England:

“It all began when (Ayatollah Khomeini) assumed the power of life and death over the life of a writer. This was a watershed between doctrinaire aggression and physical aggression. There was an escalation. The assumption of power over life and death then passed to every single inconsequential Muslim in the world—as if someone had given them a new stature. Al Qaeda is the descendent of this phenomenon. The proselytization of Islam became vigorous after this. People went to Saudi Arabia. Madrassas were established everywhere.”

The effectiveness of the fatwa (Rushdie was forced into hiding, and briefly “converted” to Islam), the later success of Islamists in causing newspapers to self-censor in the case of the cartoons, the myriad attempts by Islamists since then to assert the predominance of their own laws on European soil — all of these things are inarguably a direct consequence of European immigration policy in the past few decades. The historic, pivotal fatwa had such big teeth not because of the pronouncement of some foreign religious leader , but because his fellow soldiers in faith had Rushdie physically surrounded, on Rushdie’s own soil. The West’s putative generosity backfired, and it continues to do so.
Theodore Dalrymple, referring to an opinion piece in Le Monde that called for the abolition of prisons, coined a phrase that’s stuck with me ever since I read it:

“There is in the article a moral exhibitionism, which is generosity of spirit at other people’s expense. This, I think, is one of the sicknesses of our age, the desire to appear more-compassionate-than-thou.”

Salman Rushdie, Kurt Westergaard, the families and friends of Pym Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh, European commoners and editors and journalists who censor their public expressions for the sake of their own safety and comfort, civic police forces who don’t dare enter “microstates” in the middle of what were, for many hundreds of years, their ancestors’ own cities – these people surely understand better than most of the rest of us that the West’s smug, self-satisfying “generosity of spirit” and openness – “accommodativeness“, as Soyinka put it – can indeed come “at other people’s expense.”
Now, if we could just admit it, that would be great.

Since Climategate, Wall Street predators have been taking their lumps along with corrupt scientists … the difference between the two is that scientists deal in reputation and modest fortunes … Wall Street deals in great heaps of Goldman Sachs size USD:

Touted by its supporters as the best and cheapest way to fight global warming, carbon trading is losing momentum amid the uncertainty created by the failure of the Copenhagen summit meeting and President Barack Obama’s political troubles in the United States.
Investors are steering clear of energy-saving projects meant to generate carbon credits, and traders in Europe are hunkering down through a period of consolidation that is disappointing to those who had hoped carbon markets would grow quickly into a $2 trillion-a-year business.

… somehow I don’t think that Paulson, Gore, Condi Rice, and all the other Climate Exchange investors are going to take this lying down.
… meanwhile, back at the ranch, Canada puts its plan in place.