Not really, according to the conclusion of this review of his Civilization: The Six Ways the West Beat the Rest:

…
Wishing that the nations of the West retain their cultural character in historic continuity with their ancestors, reproducing their own populations, with some influx from outside, but not mass migration, is not racist (4); it is conservative. A conservative idea of Western civilization would include the Enlightenment as well as the Christian tradition, the Greco-Roman principles of natural aristocracy, and the age-old ethnic character of European peoples. Conservatives don’t accept the premises of the ‘end of history’ and the unchallenged ascendancy of a liberal global system that discredits and neutralizes local loyalties, historical communities, and family life. The Liberal enlightenment did promote a radical and universalizing side of the Western heritage. But this enlightenment was nurtured by a particular historical setting, religion and community, and without these traditions the heritage of the West amounts to nothing more than a set of killer applications.

You’ll probably be surprised at the author’s, er, provenance.

Air quality improving across Canada since 1970s, risk of pollution-related illness overstated.

Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
Montreal Gazette, Nov. 19th;

The White House sent new signals Sunday that President Barack Obama may be forced to kill TransCanada Corp.’s Keystone XL oilsands pipeline if his administration is forced to make a decision on the project within 60 days.
Gene Sperling, a senior economic adviser to Obama, told CNN that legislation requiring a final ruling on Keystone XL within two months could doom the pipeline because there’s not enough time to complete a new environmental review.

John Mauldin.com (free subscription);

“Which brings us to the rather strange case of the Keystone XL Pipeline project….”

(bumped, because this graphic deserves wider distribution)

The Economist notes something important:

Revenge of the petrolheads
Fossil-fuel cars are getting much cleaner, making life hard for green ones

This photo was captured by a friend of mine in Verona, Italy yesterday:

At current exchange rates, the bottom price of 1.733 Euros/Litre for Unleaded Gas, works out to: Cdn$2.35/L or US$8.80/gallon.
Current gas prices in North America can be found here.

Doctors make different end of life choices than most people.

This year’s selection by Foreign Policy magazine has but one Canadian, Steven Pinker at number 48 (not that anybody outside Canada knows he’s Canadian). Here’s a piece by him:

A History of (Non)Violence
Why humans are becoming more peaceful.

Reviews of his recent book on the theme, The Better Angels of Our Nature, are listed at his website; I’m not convinced things are quite as rosy as he pictures, what with nuclear war somewhere always a possibility. The book is included at number 5 in the (rather trendy) list here:

The Global Thinkers’ Book Club
Want to think like the world’s best minds? Start by reading like them. The FP Global Thinkers’ 20 most recommended titles.

Why trendy? Well, look which Canadian’s, er, work is on it:

12. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
(2007)
By Naomi Klein…

There’s also this by Canadian Doug Saunders of the Globe and Mail:

7. Arrival City: How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World (2010)

I have some relatives in town from Humboldt, Saskatchewan. They and a buddy of mine had dinner over at my place. I asked my friend what he wanted to drink and mentioned that I had some German beer in the fridge, given to me on July 1st by some lovely ladies from Deutschland that we both know. He accepted the offer of beer. I brought it out to him, along with a glass. When I returned to the table I saw that he had poured it into the glass. I did a double-take because I thought I wasn’t seeing correctly. But alas, I was. It was GREEN!!! I’ve sent a message to the fräuleins but have not yet heard back from them. Has anyone seen such a beer before?!

Many of the Urban Camping Aficionados have stated over & over again that there’s no work for them. Well, one division of the U.S. Government has just posted a new job ad that might very well be perfect for them.
There are a few restrictions though:

• Height between 5’2″ and 6’3″
• 20/20 vision or correctable to the same
• Blood pressure not to exceed 140/90 measured in a sitting position
• Regular drug-testing will be required

While the last item may knock out of contention many of the Occupy crowd, surely there must be some who would pass. Interested Occupy participants and/or SDA trolls can check out a few other requirements here.

I had occasion to use my HP 41CX calculator today. What a brilliant piece of technology! It’s almost 30 years old and still looks & works like new.

I can’t think of any other technology I own that has been as trouble-free as this device. On the opposite end of the spectrum are print cartridges, including those from HP. A friend of mine is a print cartridge reseller and printer repairman. He insists that print cartridges were very much reengineered to fail sooner than they need to, falling under the category of planned obsolescence. Incidentally, in case you’ve never seen it before, this chart of the cost of various liquids is fascinating.
Open Question: Are there any items you own that have surprised you in terms of how much longer than expected they’ve lasted or how much quicker than expected they’ve broken?

Those goldarn Yankees are finally really starting to sit up and take notice, one result of the work of those goldarn oh so inventive capitalists!
Predate:

We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Mirrors/Fans, or, What Frackin’ Peak Oil?

John Stossel;

“We’re the country that built the intercontinental railroad,” Obama says. “So how can we now sit back and let China build the best railroads?”
[…]
The transcontinental railroad lost tons of money. The government never covered its costs, and most rail lines that used the tracks went bankrupt or continued to be subsidized by taxpayers.
The Union Pacific and Northern Pacific — all those rail lines we learned about in history class — milked the taxpayer and then went broke.
One line worked. The Great Northern never went bankrupt. It was the railroad that got no subsidies.

Via

All too infrequently recognized:

…Stephen Harper was re-elected on a platform that put him considerably to the left of Barack Obama and the voters of Ontario re-elected a man who would be called a Bolshevik by American Tea Partiers, if American Tea Partiers knew what a Bolshevik is…

Reasons for Dragon train-crashing:

China Bullet Trains Trip on Technology
SHANGHAI—China celebrated its bullet trains as the home-grown pride of a nation: a rail system faster and more advanced than any other, showcasing superior Chinese technology.
However, China’s high-speed rail network was in fact built with imported components—including signaling-system parts designed to prevent train collisions—that local engineers couldn’t fully understand, according to a review of corporate documents and interviews with more than a dozen rail executives inside and outside China…

Getty Images
At 8:37 p.m., Train No. D301 rammed into the back of No. D3115, which was nearly stationary on the tracks, in Wenzhou. The accident killed 40 people and injured at least 190. The impact sent four carriages plunging 65 feet off the elevated rail line

Perhaps related:

Why China won’t conquer the world
Its young are incapable, its old are exhausted, and box-ticking bureaucrats make life hell. China, a superpower? First it needs to grow up, says acclaimed author Xué Xinran

Joseph Halpern died in Ottawa this past summer. He was 88. He might have looked like every other old man each of us sees regularly but his history was certainly a whole lot different than most. This description of his life is well worth a read. Quite a contrast from the lives that we all lead today!
The old adage, “don’t judge a man unless you’ve walked a mile in his shoes”, certainly applies here.

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…

Clifford Olson is dead.

One wonders how many people in Serbia stayed up rather late tonight. Modern gladiators.
After Wimbledon:

Another Great One?
Update: SDA number eight on the Google search for “Singidunum” (h/t James in “Comments”).

On September 7, 1940 German bombers started appearing in the skies over London and dropping a seemingly endless stream of bombs on the civilians below. This changed the face of World War 2 in such a way that the civilians of Germany would regret even more in the following years of the war.

In fact even then in policy application essentially an aspirational exhortation:

But the lady turned less than her successor (p. 3):

…During Margaret Thatcher’s premiership public spending grew in real terms by an
average of 1.1% a year, while during John Major’s premiership it grew by an average of 2.4%
a year…

Moreover, given economic growth, this happened:

…
The Thatcher government brought public spending down from 48.1 per cent of national income in that year to 41.6 per cent in 1987-1988…

Via Rob Snow of CFRA Ottawa (and Denise):

…
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Afternoon Edition – Tuesday’s Political Hour – The Strategists…