Real secessionist movements would rightly recognize this as a lot of bunk. That’s why since the Parti Québécois came along, everywhere on the planet has seceded – Slovenia, Slovakia, even Montenegro – but Quebec remains a province of Canada. Don’t get me wrong, I love Quebec, and all the more so since I became wanted for hate crimes in English Canada. But I could run a better separatist movement in my sleep. That’s because (and if you don’t like the Sunni comparison stand well back), just as the PLO was a terrorist operation masquerading as a nationalist movement, so the PQ/BQ is a shakedown operation masquerading as a nationalist movement.

Related; “Dion should read his own book“.

“Ask not, what your country can spend for you.”

“I had the same experience.”

After years of volunteer work, taking vacation days to teach a “genius” class of bright kids from our church school (itself clearly a social crime in the brave, new and disgusting “Beneath the Wheel” world of leveling education), I was told I had to undergo vetting for criminal behavior. I told them to go to hell, a place they profess a deep knowlege of. Others, more compliant, will take my place, and argue that it is not so bad, and well intended. Like helping the Jews by resettling them in the East, perhaps?
The mark of the socialist is to classify, since that is simplier than having to think. Thus to the nazi, Jews were a class of subhumans, and to Pol Pot’s murder squads, those who wore glasses were intellectuals, thus a threat to the perfect agrarian society, and should be shot. To the racketeers of the Left, white men, who largely were the inventive and operational core (for whatever reason) during most of the development of Western Society have to be the class of oppressors (although very few ever were). But why? Because that is where the money is! Western Culture brought us the toilet, the telephone, antibiotics, photography, ships of the sea and air, institutionalized curiosity (a.k.a. Science) and the engineering that makes science useful. It made freedom possible, because it made us rich (well, overall). But like the Nazi’s, who went after the Jews with invented claptrap and insane ideas, because the Jews were where the money was, the rise of the sensitivity culture is a piracy culture, an extortionist racket.
At the root of this piracy is the legal system, which has developed an infuriating, disproportionate ability to collect damages beyond all proportion. Thus churches and corporations, being largely productive(the magic word is “have assets”) are thrown open to ruin by the disconnect between the jury awards and reason, since the ethical spine of the jurors themselves is the pivot. Most jurors are well meaning, but suckers for spending other people’s money (as are, co-incidentally, your governments, which in the midst of a developing depression, want an even larger division of your labor…why should (socialist) public pensions and salaries and other comforts be inconvenienced by your troubles?).
What has really created a problem is that as socialist dogma in the public schools spreads it has infected jury pools with irresponsible, self-absorbed free-lunch types. At least in part because of this, sexual abuses, and God forbid, personal slights and perceived unkindness, which we all know will occur from time to time, become the fodder for disproportionate and destructive awards extracted from well-meaning and/or productive organizations. Small wonder then that the “touchy-feely” elements of the legal rackets promptly step forward with antidotes for the very venoms they spew. The price is reasonable! Just a few thousand dollars per session, or per backgrounder, plus the decency, dignity and presumption of innoncence once promised to us as citizens, and always deserved by decent people. So what if you get thrown under the bus by the indifference of law and the vile greed of the hyperbolic, extortinate left: on the one hand they have the opportunity to extravagantly loot productive organizations, on the other to to make money immunizing against lawsuits. What’s not to like?
This degrades society and wastes resources, but it is easier for institutions and corporations to become the handmaidens of fraud-peddling social engineers, abusing and insulting volunteers or employees, rather than take a principled stand against this abuse.
This is truly a high tech middle ages that is evolving. The age of reason is over.

h/t to PiperPaul

Thomas Sowell;

Amid all the political and media hysteria, national output has declined by less than one-half of one percent. In fact, it may not have declined even that much– or at all– when the statistics are revised later, as they very often are.
We are not talking about the Great Depression, when output dropped by one-third and unemployment soared to 25 percent.
What we are talking about is a golden political opportunity for politicians to use the current financial crisis to fundamentally change an economy that has been successful for more than two centuries, so that politicians can henceforth micro-manage all sorts of businesses and play Robin Hood, taking from those who are not likely to vote for them and transferring part of their earnings to those who will vote for them.
For that, the politicians need lots of hype, and that is being generously supplied by the media.

Would North America have Facebook today?
Or, eh, the wheel?
h/t
*

Glenn Reynolds;

So we’ve had nearly 8 years of lefty assassination fantasies about George W. Bush, and Bill Ayers’ bombing campaign is explained away as a consequence of him having just felt so strongly about social justice, but a few people yell things at McCain rallies and suddenly it’s a sign that anger is out of control in American politics? It’s nice of McCain to try to tamp that down, and James Taranto sounds a proper cautionary note — but, please, can we also note the staggering level of hypocrisy here? (And that’s before we get to the Obama campaign’s thuggish tactics aimed at silencing critics.)
The Angry Left has gotten away with all sorts of beyond-the-pale behavior throughout the Bush Administration. The double standards involved — particularly on the part of the press — are what are feeding this anger. (Indeed, as Ann Althouse and John Leo have noted, the reporting on this very issue is dubious). So while asking for McCain supporters to chill a bit, can we also ask the press to start doing its job rather than openly shilling for a Democratic victory?

From the comments;

I was at the widely reported Bethlehem rally, standing in the middle of the arena. There were exactly four voices yelling, widely spaced, never in unison and never picked up by the crowd. There were about five separate instances that I recall. None were memorable or frankly concise enough to make me turn and look nor to remember what they had said. There were, I think, 6000 people in the building. The crowd’s and my own typical response was, ‘boo’, to bad guys and their policies and obviously, ‘yay’, for the good guys and their policies.
We didn’t get a chance to boo the MSM. Maybe we should have, the lying pricks.
They could have been planted by the Obama campaign. They certainly did not reflect the 5996 other participants.

Government is, generally speaking, the political system by which a body of people are administered and regulated. As George Washington noted, “Government is not reason, it is not eloquence ~ it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearsome master”. Barry Goldwater said that “government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away”. Ronald Reagan said that “the most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help”.

Democracy, as George Bernard Shaw noted, “is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few”. Oscar Wilde said that “democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people”. More exactly, perhaps, Thomas Jefferson said that “democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine”.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be too harsh, though; Winston Churchill did say that “democracy is the worst form of government we know of except for all the others“. (Still, Sir Winston also said that “the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter”.) Perhaps Voltaire was closest when he said that “an ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination” (probably not 😉

H. L. Mencken said, “Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses.” Voltaire said that “in general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to another”. George Bernard Shaw said that “government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul”.

But H. L. Mencken said it best when he said, about democracy, that:

“Government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can’t get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods.”

Thomas Jefferson noted the biggest problems with all this, as follows:

• “Most bad government has grown out of too much government.”
• “I think myself that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.”
• “Democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.”

Simply put: there is too much state redistribution and regulation auctioneering going on. Our government steals too much freedom and pillage to reward panting and pining parasites who are unwilling to be responsible and work, at the expense of the labor of the responsible industrious. That will eventually kill democracy. Is that what we want?

So, as it is not likely that arguing against government or democracy per se are viable political alternatives in Canada for the foreseeable future, and that’s probably a good thing, the best available solution to our problems with government in Canada for the foreseeable future can be found by combining Mencken’s and Jefferson’s results into the following prescription:

In every election, each citizen should vote for the party or candidate that they think will be the least bad auctioneer, in the sense that they will do the least amount of auctioneering.

Unfortunately, too many citizens feel that because they must vote for the least bad alternative, because there is never a most good alternative, they should just skip the whole exercise, or to be extra dashing, make the extra useless effort to spoil their ballot.

Some liberals might say, for example: I’m not going to vote for the liberals because they want to lower income tax and raise consumption tax, and that is not liberal. Or some conservatives might say, for example: I’m not going to vote for the conservatives because they want to raise income tax and lower consumption tax, and that is not conservative. (As were the cases in the last election.)

And for bonus points, nowadays some of those people will run around in blog comments and stamp their little feet and insist that because the party they want to vote for didn’t do some particular thing they want or wanted, not only are they not going to vote, but that you are not a valid supporter of that party if you disagree with the little-foot stamper.

People who think like that are being irresponsible citizens; childish at best, evil at worst. In a well-functioning society, and Canada is a well-functioning society, changes happen at the margins. Under these circumstances, the responsible thing to do is to study the data, think carefully, decide who you think is the least bad selection (at the margin), and vote it.

Sure, if you care enough about it, go ahead, form a new party, get on the ballot, win a plurality in the auctioneer contest, and then you can be auctioneer. But you had better be ready to give the people what they want, not what you want, or you won’t win a plurality.

Until then, though, it is what it is. Plato said that “the price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men”. Until your personal political party is in power, it is your civic duty to study the alternatives and to vote for the one you think will do the least amount of auctioneering.

It’s the least you can do.

See, Jas… I think you’re a little confused. If you’ve got any sort of a beef here… you should take it up with Prime Minister Robert Borden. Now admittedly, that won’t be easy… as he died 71 years ago, in 1937… but that, my friend, is precisely the point.

“Ralph’s* going to get mauled like a puppy in a bear cage.” – John Gormley

In response to Stephane Dion’s explanation that the employment collapse in the oil, gas, potash, uranium and farming sectors that he admits will result from Liberal Party’s planned Green Shaft carbon tax will be balanced out by new research opportunities into “green technology” at the University of Regina.
He actually said that.
And that the Liberal Green Shift was necessary to submit to demands of US Congress and an incoming President Obama for “clean” oil.
He actually said that, too.
If the Harper Conservatives don’t use those quotes to hang a sign around the neck of the Liberals reading ‘Made in Washington’ Energy Policy, their political braintrust should be hauled out to Kandahar and thrown to the jihadis.
(You can pick up today’s show On Demand.)
Update: John Murney has more on Dion’s sputtering, and don’t miss Goodale Watch.

One of my favourite essayist bloggers will be a guest on the Charles Adler show today, scheduled for about 12:30 Saskatchewan time. (You can listen live at the link.) If you’re unfamiliar with Bill’s work, head over to Eject! Eject! Eject! for a taste of his writing.
There’s no pretentiousness about Bill’s prose, no self-indulgent vocabulary revving. He simply walks the reader down a path, pointing things out in the language of the average man, as he delivers solid whacks upside the head employing a giant paddle some might call “common sense”.

To be Politically Correct these days, you must accept the collectivist belief that words are like weapons, endowed with their own internal, innate power, and this power, like that of a chambered bullet, cannot be trusted to be used responsibly and so must be outlawed and banished from the community.
PC advocates have strict rules for what they call Hate Speech, and using such speech essentially makes you a criminal.
So much for the First Amendment. But the Bill of Rights never meant much to these people; indeed, they see it as an impediment to human progress.
Implicit in this belief is that I have the power to harm you by my use of language. Notice that all the responsibility falls on the speaker; the listener, the subject, is completely powerless, and has achieved the highest status with the group: victim. Note also that this worshipping of the victim, is in essence, the elevation of the most powerless and the least responsible to divine status. It is a very basic sleight of hand, that allows the controlling elites to maintain that they are only trying to help the poor and downtrodden, when in reality their actions are clearly nothing more than a naked grab for power that would shame the most ruthless corporate CEO.
Who decides what is hate speech? The group decides. If one person in the group seriously finds something offensive, then that term or phrase or entire concept is added to the list or proscribed terms, and this is how we get to office memo’s being critical of the term “brainstorming” as being offensive to epileptic co-workers.
If we buy into this idea of Political Correctness, we do several things, all ruinous: we give other people the power to demean us, we remove any chance at reasoned debate on any issue, and most importantly, in a group of 300 million professionally offended people, we come to a vocabulary of perhaps twenty or thirty words that have been so bleached of potential offensiveness and meaning that language itself becomes worthless.
[…]
How much better, how much stronger and healthier are we, when we dare anyone to use whatever terms they choose, and rather than sitting as powerless victims, rise in angry and righteous indignation to fight the human filth that use words like nigger, spick, gook, mick, kike, dago, and all the rest? How much more secure, how much more inoculated, are we when we can hear these words knowing that those who use them are discredited and terrified infants so out of ideas and argument that they must resort to such childish tactics to reassure themselves? What words can hurt us when we refuse to be hurt by words? What simple and powerful wisdom is bound up in Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me?

It’s an uncommon gift
(h/t to reader Martin B. whose suggestion was noted in the comments. SDA gets results!)

Broadcast in New York City on WPIX, Channel 11
Sunday, December 7, 1975, 10:30 – 11:00 P.M.
Moderator/Host Richard D. Heffner
Guest: Milton Friedman, economist

FRIEDMAN: Let me give you a very simple example. Take the minimum wage law. Its well-meaning sponsors — there are always in these cases two groups of sponsors. There are the well-meaning sponsors and there are the special interests who are using the well-meaning sponsors as front men. You almost always when you have bad programs have an unholy coalition of the do-gooders on the one hand and the special interests on the other. The minimum wage law is as clear a case as you could want. The special interests are, of course, the trade unions, the monopolistic craft trade unions in particular. The do-gooders believe that by passing a law saying that nobody shall get less than $2 an hour or $2.50 an hour, or whatever the minimum wage is, you are helping poor people who need the money. You are doing nothing of the kind. What you are doing is to assure that people whose skills are not sufficient to justify that kind of a wage will be unemployed.

Transcript
Via Carpe Diem

George Jonas has been practicing crimethink against the Human Rights Commissions since their inception. He addresses the topic again:

To borrow Orwell’s language, anyone retained by Canada’s thinkpol should be a goodthinker, fluent in newspeak. He ought to bring to his task a bellyfeel about crimethinkers and the correct way of dealing with them. He should have a capacity for doublethink and recognize the importance of keeping anything malreported out of the public discourse, especially away from such prolefeed as the Internet.

Not selectively bestowed by pandering politicians and underachieving bureaucrats.

So said Eleanor Roosevelt, a champion for universal human rights back in the day when the left still believed in the idea, believed such rights were innate, were morally superior to cruelty and ignorance and barbarism, were worth fighting and dying to preserve, protect and extend to every man, woman and child on earth. Today she is quoted by free people sneered at as racists for refusing to endorse the submission of women made evident in sexual-mutilation and child “marriage”, refusing to accept apartheid law in place of common law, refusing to accept medieval sumptuary law in place of self-expression or blasphemy law for freedom of speech. Most grotesque of all, dismissed as racists by neo-Nazis and their allies and their apologists for the new crime of opposing genocidal anti-Semitism; this in living memory of the Holocaust.

And there are people out there who want to wreck it for them.
Annette Desmerais is associate professor justice studies at the University of Regina, Jim Handy a professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan. For the Western Producer (behind subscriber wall).

It is this neoliberal, industrial and corporate-driven model of agriculture that has been globalized over the past 30 years. This is a model that treats food like any other commodity, presents agriculture exclusively as a profit-making venture, concentrates productive resources into the hands of agro-industry and places food in commodities futures markets.
Here profit-hungry speculators, investors and hedge funds scoop up millions of dollars through frenzied bidding and betting on price changes and predictions of scarcities. Agriculture has moved away from its primary function, that of feeding humans.
Today, less than half of the world’s grains are eaten by humans, Instead, grains are used primarily to feed animals, and recently these grains are now being converted into agrofuel to feed cars. This is manufactured scarcity par excellence.
[…]
National polices such as price controls, tariffs and marketing boards, designed to ensure the viability of small-scale farmers and an adequate supply of culturally appropriate and nutritious food through support for domestic agriculture, have been replaced by the voracious demands of the market.
[…]
La Via Campesina, an international farm movement representing 149 organizations from 56 countries, argues that the global food crisis demonstartes the desperate need to build a fundamentally new model of agriculture — one based on food sovereignty.
[… They argue] that this crisis can be resolved only if governments support peasant and small-scale production, rebuild their national food economies and regulate international markets and if the international community respects and protects and fulfills human rights, especially the right to food.

A Saskatchewan grain producer of 50 years replies. You know him here as “Spike1”;

“Adequate food is simple justice” reads the headline.
Well, well well, a professor of justice and a professor of history, chiding the growers, traders and distributors of food for treating food as a commodity – blaming profit hungry traders, speculators, and hedge funds for the high price of food. This drivel from professors that earn a scandalous return on investment, (with tenure, by the way), by being paid tens of thosuands of dollars with not one nickle invested, makes me respond to the tripe.
A professor of history that ignores the great famines of the past in Russia, China and elsewhere under the communists, the famines of the present in North Korea and Africa that have nothing to do with traders and speculators, but with despots willing to starve their own people.
A professor of justice ignoring the tariffs and other governmenbt restrictions on the movement of food. A professor of justice that thinks that others should be responsible for feeding him and others.
Professors that distain the feeding of feed grains and ethanol by-products to livestock, thus converting waste products into concentrated protein for human consumption. Professors that live in a city where not one in a thousand, including themselves, are self sufficient in food.
La Via Campesina wants a return to the “back to the land” movement – as happened in China when millions starved and the government controlled the availability of food.
Professors that advocate a cheap food policy for the world’s poor, but support marketing boards that restrict the production of food to maintain the artificially high price for commodities (with the resulting quota bidding) better remember which side they are on.
Professors that seem to be ignorant of the need for animals for motive power and agriculture in all countries. Cattle and sheep that harvest the grass in dry and mountainous regions, thus converting it to protein for human consumption. Yaks that till the rice fields, horses, oxen, and other animals that haul farm produce to markets, cows that graze at will and supply milk and fuel in India, the list goes on.
The Canadian government isntituted a cheap food policy in the Trudeau years, and the result was the decimation of the farm population. Maybe it’s time for a cheap university education policy – not with subsidies, but with the slashing of income for professors, like the cheap food policy did for farmers.
The mansions built in University Park weren’t built by traders and speculators in food.

The May 24th debate from the 30th Annual Conference of the Canadian Association of Journalists is up at CPAC.
Update: Reaction in the comments – “HOLYSHIT!”

This sounds like an interesting book that would be worth the time for Canadians to read, too. While the book addresses British politics I think many of the same maladies and trends apply to Canada as well. We’ve certainly seen a rather stubborn trend of growth and power of the political class in Canada and getting Conservative parties elected has rather less effect on this trend than we would like.
Perhaps we haven’t descended as far or fast down this path as Britain has, and thankfully we don’t have the complications of the EU to deal with, but I think this book might offer some lessons for us in Canada.
Read the whole post here:

His basic argument is that today’s political class has little experience of the real world outside the corridors of power, is drawn from an insular group of metropolitan folk who consider themselves superior to, and cut off from, the ordinary mass; it craves power for its own sake and for its monetary rewards, is corrupt, venal, obsessed by controlling the media, and has damaged and is damaging any institutions and practices – such as the old House of Lords or judiciary – that get in its way. Oborne argues his case with a tremendous passion and penetrating use of argument. At the end of the 334 pages of text one is left – which I think is the idea – feeling rather depressed. With good reason.

And check out the book here.

I am Mark Steyn, too.

The Covenant Zone bloggers will be demonstrating in support of Mark Steyn and Maclean’s magazine, and against the ludicrous operation of ‘human rights’ law in this country, when Mark’s hearing in front of the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal kicks off, next Monday, June 2.

Details here.

This is my first ever speech in Vancouver. And, amazingly enough, it’s also my last ever speech in Vancouver. So it’s kind of a two-for-one night. It’s like when they say “Direct from Broadway. Limited engagement.” This is a very limited engagement. The reason for that is, next Monday, the excerpt from my bestselling hate crime, America Alone, that Maclean’s made the mistake of publishing, next Monday that book excerpt goes on trial at the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal. As some of you know, the Canadian Islamic Congress has accused me and Maclean’s of “flagrant Islamophobia”. And the trial begins Monday morning at the Robson Square courthouse – 9 o’clock Monday morning. Go to Robson Square and look for the old lady by the guillotine doing her knitting, you can’t miss it. She’s knitting a nice “The World Needs More Canada” sweater out of discarded copies of Magna Carta. It’s a very moving sight. It would have, of course, be wholly improper of me to comment on a case before the courts, but hey, that’s the kinda guy I am.

I’ll provide a link to the whole thing when I find one. In the meantime, you can read other portions here.
Related
And The CHRC Ad Campaign.

“No, those who scare me are those who (not entirely unlike the Nazis) are in positions of authority and responsibility and think that this gives them a vantage point on what kinds of speech should and should not be acceptable. It’s not that I care deeply if some truly marginal and deeply resentful fool gets caught in the sights of some kind of hate police and penalized. It’s that in creating such a precedent for thought policing, both cop and citizen naturally ask, well,
who’s next?“

Reading this quote again, I’d disagree in one respect. I do care that “truly marginal and deeply resentful fools” get caught in the HRC web as much as I do the unsuspecting restaurant owner wanting to keep his doorway free of pot smoking loiterers.
I don’t need to share their marginal views or resentment to defend their right not to be harrassed by a bureaucracy that defaults to “guilty until proven innocent”.
Why? Because, it’s the truly resentful who are most likely to carry their frustrations beyond verbal release into murderous violence when backed into a corner, and doubly so when those doing the backing trade in provocateurism and injustice. When the unbalanced finally snap, it’s rarely the bureaucrat behind the machinery who endures their wrath – it’s the innocent at their workplace, or the police officer who pulls them over for speeding who find themselves in the crosshairs.
It’s a tricky enough business dealing with these individuals within the justice system proper. The last thing we need are the thumbscrews of the human rights racket being applied to such cases.