A brilliant piece by Per Bylund on the degrading effects of the welfare state on Swedish society.

The problem is that the welfare state was created and it would dramatically change people’s lives and affect their morality in a fundamental way. The welfare state might have been a successful project if people had continued to have the pride and morality to supply for themselves and only seek support if really in need. That is, adding a welfare state could possibly work in a ceteris paribus world, which is what the welfare state really presumes. But the world is ever-changing, and the welfare state therefore requires people to be stronger and morally superior to people in societies lacking a welfare state.
[…]
The children of my grandparents’ generation, my parents among them, quickly learned and embraced a new morality based on the welfare “rights” offered by the social security system. While the older generation would not accept dependence on others (including state welfare benefits) they did not object to sending the younger generation to public schools to get educated. I am certain they never thought in terms of having a “right” to have their children educated. Rather, they accepted and appreciated the opportunity for their children to have a chance they themselves had never had — through “free” education.
So my parents’ generation went to public schools where they were taught mathematics and languages as well as the superiority of welfare and the morality of the state. They learned the workings of the machinery of the welfare state and gained a totally new (mis)conception of rights: all citizens enjoy a right — only through being citizens — to education, health care, unemployment, and social security.
Being an individual, they were taught, means having a right to support for your individual needs. Everybody has a right to all the resources necessary to pursue one’s own and society’s happiness, they were told. And everybody should enjoy the right to put their children in state daycare centers while working, making it possible for every family to earn two salaries (but not enough time to raise their children). The opportunities for “the good life,” at least financially, must have seemed enormous to the older generations.
This new morality permeated the populace and became the “natural” state of things, at least in their minds. This generation, born during the two or three decades following World War II, became considerably different from their parents’ generation morally and philosophically. They got used to the enormous post-war economic growth (thanks to Sweden never entering the war) and the ever-increasing welfare rights of the rapidly growing state. (To sustain the growth of the welfare state and satisfy the popular demand for benefits, the Swedish government devaluated the currency a number of times during the 1970s and 1980s.)
The effects upon society of this generation growing up and entering the labor market were principally two: increased public pressure for more progressive politics; and large-scale, society-wide failure to raise independent and moral children able to be their own masters in life.

Read the whole thing. (Though, it’s going to be a tough swallow for our readers on the anti-depressant left….)

With post titles like “11 reasons why working mothers can’t stand housewives”, you just know you’re onto something special. Let’s just say she has “issues”.
(As an aside – what is it about those who skulk about on the toxic fringes of the leftosphere that they are so loathe to reveal their identities?)

Times Online;

BRITAIN’S most senior policeman Sir Ian Blair is facing a race relations dilemma after the release of figures that reveal almost half the number of people arrested in relation to car crime in London are black.
[…]
Last week the Met attempted to explain the high number of arrests among blacks by the fact that they make up a higher proportion of the population in areas such as Southwark and Lewisham in south London, where the ANPR units operate.
However, statistics from the 2001 census show that the highest black population in any borough is no greater than about 25%. The proportion of black people across the capital as a whole is about 11%.
Peter Herbert, an independent member of the MPA and spokesman for the Society of Black Lawyers, said: “The Met really wants to avoid any allegation of disproportionality so they will seek to explain these figures by whatever nuance they can. The targeting of certain boroughs might be justified in terms of some crime, but it’s certainly not justified in terms of all crime.”

One presumes city officials will soon set about designing racial sensitivity training programs for the automatic numberplate recognition cameras responsible for collecting the data.
h/t

And another worm wiggles free.
An Alberta court has ruled that the law requiring a photo be taken for the purpose of drivers license identification violates the religious beliefs of Hutterites and is unconstitutional. (No link available yet)
Next up:

Via John Gormley LIve, where callers were quick to point out that they don’t seem to have any religious objection to having their images captured by surveillance video at Wal-Mart.
Upon further reflection… does this confer legal immunity on Hutterite drivers photographed by red light cameras?

Like I said, to the victor go the spoils.
CBC

A draft copy of the final residential school agreement shows that the federal government will pay $40 million each to a Regina law firm and a national consortium of lawyers.

None of that includes the significant legal bills submitted in the course of the long running adjudication process, (for which I’ve been told one firm was paid to do nothing but attend on behalf of the federal government). And that leads me to mention another quirk of process – in the case of residential school claims, the word “adjudication” refers to hammering out an agreement the government is obligated to accept, while the complainant had the option of walking away to try for more.

Via email;

Have you heard of Maclean’s In-Class Program? I’m a substitute teacher & just got home from teaching Social Studies 10 where the students had to work on “current events” & were each given their own April 17th edition of Maclean’s magazine to use to answer MICP inspired questions from the cover article “The Worst President in 100 Years?”
You’ve maybe seen it, not that you’d have to see it to know that the answer according to Maclean’s is “yes”.
There the students sat as quiet as cherubs reading & drinking it all in. As I watched the kids work it made me long for the days when Social Studies classes at least pretended to be non-partisan (the next article was of the Tory/NDP/Bloc conspiracy to sink the Libs). Then, my earlier business training kicked in & I realized how Maclean’s is grooming future subscribers by positioning themselves as the “truth” to an audience that is programmed to think they are being delivered the truth.
Teachers don’t care; you hand out anything in an inexpensive, photocopiable,
easy-to-deliver package and it’s used.
The teacher’s guide is designed by teacher Allan Hardy as well as Peter Flaherty of CBC News in Review & member of the Faculty of Ed at York. Gold Sponsor of the program is The Centre for Education & Training…a self-described “progressive” not for profit corporation, providing 1000 students with magazines.
The whole program just seems kind of…wrong…to me. It’s one thing to use the media to teach critical thinking, another thing if the media sets it up & benefits while broadening the sheep count.
Somehow I suspect my teacher’s union wouldn’t appreciate my concern for
Canada’s quality of education.

And that is why, like so many other concerned contributers to SDA, the writer asked to have their identity protected.
*.

A reader points to this Globe and Mail coverage of the multiple murders in Medicine Hat over the weekend. A 23 year old Jeremy Allan Steinke, and a 12 year old girl, whose identity is protected under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, were arrested in Leader, Sk.

Now, three members of that family — Mr. and Mrs. Richardson, and their grade-school-aged son — are dead, killed in their tidy four-level house some time before Sunday afternoon, police say. The elder child, a girl, is not dead.

Of course, there’s always Google News, where memories last a little longer.
More here. (Parents – get the computers out into the family room, where you can watch what your kids do, ok?)

Darcey, at DMB;

The Canadian coverage of the issue as seen on CTV and CBC is almost apologetic and provide more focus on the pro-Chavez demonstrators. Its no wonder we have so many Chavez sympathizers in this country.

Reader Stephen Bloom wrote me a while ago with these observations;

I am appalled by the coverage of the subj. by Cdn media. [of the kidnapped and murdered Faddoul brothers -ed ]. A few reports when they were abducted and then virtually nothing until their tragic demise. Contrast that with the media’s obsession with the ‘Christian Peace Makers.’
I rule out the possibility that the children were ignored because of their hyphenated nationality (consider the Cdn/NZ ‘nationality-of-convenience’ of one of the CPM). It occurs to me that they have been ignored because of the bad light that might be cast upon the ‘socialist paradise’ of Venezuela with its rampant corruption under the lefts favourite Bush-baiter. What do you think?

I think he’s figured it out.
There’s a photo essay up at Venezuela News And Views.

To mark World Earth Day, an exerpt from Climate of Fear, by Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT;

To understand the misconceptions perpetuated about climate science and the climate of intimidation, one needs to grasp some of the complex underlying scientific issues. First, let’s start where there is agreement. The public, press and policy makers have been repeatedly told that three claims have widespread scientific support: Global temperature has risen about a degree since the late 19th century; levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have increased by about 30% over the same period; and CO2 should contribute to future warming. These claims are true. However, what the public fails to grasp is that the claims neither constitute support for alarm nor establish man’s responsibility for the small amount of warming that has occurred. In fact, those who make the most outlandish claims of alarm are actually demonstrating skepticism of the very science they say supports them. It isn’t just that the alarmists are trumpeting model results that we know must be wrong. It is that they are trumpeting catastrophes that couldn’t happen even if the models were right as justifying costly policies to try to prevent global warming.
[…]
In Europe, Henk Tennekes was dismissed as research director of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Society after questioning the scientific underpinnings of global warming. Aksel Winn-Nielsen, former director of the U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization, was tarred by Bert Bolin, first head of the IPCC, as a tool of the coal industry for questioning climate alarmism. Respected Italian professors Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza disappeared from the debate in 1991, apparently losing climate-research funding for raising questions.
And then there are the peculiar standards in place in scientific journals for articles submitted by those who raise questions about accepted climate wisdom. At Science and Nature, such papers are commonly refused without review as being without interest. However, even when such papers are published, standards shift. When I, with some colleagues at NASA, attempted to determine how clouds behave under varying temperatures, we discovered what we called an “Iris Effect,” wherein upper-level cirrus clouds contracted with increased temperature, providing a very strong negative climate feedback sufficient to greatly reduce the response to increasing CO2. Normally, criticism of papers appears in the form of letters to the journal to which the original authors can respond immediately. However, in this case (and others) a flurry of hastily prepared papers appeared, claiming errors in our study, with our responses delayed months and longer. The delay permitted our paper to be commonly referred to as “discredited.” Indeed, there is a strange reluctance to actually find out how climate really behaves. In 2003, when the draft of the U.S. National Climate Plan urged a high priority for improving our knowledge of climate sensitivity, the National Research Council instead urged support to look at the impacts of the warming–not whether it would actually happen.

Via Ace; from Ohio State University, another shining moment for the politics of the academic left;

Scott Savage, who serves as a reference librarian for the [Ohio State] university, suggested four best-selling conservative books for freshman reading in his role as a member of OSU Mansfield�s First Year Reading Experience Committee. The four books he suggested were The Marketing of Evil by David Kupelian, The Professors by David Horowitz, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis by Bat Ye�or, and It Takes a Family by Senator Rick Santorum. Savage made the recommendations after other committee members had suggested a series of books with a left-wing perspective, by authors such as Jimmy Carter and Maria Shriver.
Savage was put under �investigation� by OSU�s Office of Human Resources after three professors filed a complaint of discrimination and harassment against him, saying that the book suggestions made them feel �unsafe.� The complaint came after the OSU Mansfield faculty voted without dissent to file charges against Savage. The faculty later voted to allow the individual professors to file charges.

The politics of “diversity”. The politics of “tolerance”. The politics of “Give us the child for 8 years and it will be a Bolshevik forever�.
Docs (PDF)

Because the Chinese are the “best dissectors in the world”.

Pick Any Two
A post by James C. Bennett, written last December, but always relevant.

James Joyner;

“Clearly, this will lead to labor peace in our time.”