This Fannie Deserves a Whipping

Great Moments In Socialism 23 Comments

George Will applies the lash:

The louder they talked about the disadvantaged, the more money they made. And the more the financial system tottered.
Who were they? Most explanations of the financial calamity have been indecipherable to people not fluent in the language of “credit default swaps” and “collateralized debt obligations.” The calamity has lacked human faces. No more.
Put on asbestos mittens and pick up “Reckless Endangerment,” the scalding new book by Gretchen Morgenson, a New York Times columnist, and Joshua Rosner, a housing finance expert. They will introduce you to James A. Johnson, an emblem of the administrative state that liberals admire.
The book’s subtitle could be: “Cry ‘Compassion’ and Let Slip the Dogs of Cupidity.” Or: “How James Johnson and Others (Mostly Democrats) Made the Great Recession.” The book is another cautionary tale about government’s terrifying self-confidence. It is, the authors say, “a story of what happens when Washington decides, in its infinite wisdom, that every living, breathing citizen should own a home.”..

Read on.

Being a Paramedic in Israel

Religion Of Submission 31 Comments

Shira Applebaum Maresky is a relatively young woman who has had a lot more happen in her life than many people twice her age. L.A. writer Amy Alkon detailed the most tragic event in her life.
Maresky was in Vancouver recently and gave a short talk on her experiences as a paramedic in Israel:

The Israel-Palestine situation is an incredibly complex one to unravel, even more so for someone living within the confines of relatively safe North America. I’ve always employed the Common Sense Test: If America or Canada were in the place of Israel and the same sort of suicide bomber attacks were occurring (say from First Nations people on their reservations), would we just bow down and say, “Oh, I guess you have a point. We’ll cave in to your demands” ?
Undoubtedly some on the Far Left would like to do that now (though never giving up their own property of course). But the vast majority of citizens would demand that the police, and military if necessary, do whatever it takes to bring order and civility back to the afflicted area(s).
How anyone can have one set of “rules” for here and a completely different set for Israel is something I will never understand.

Reader Tips

Reader Tips 31 Comments

Well, after 48 hours of great fun & frivolity, my 3 German guests have commenced their spectacular journey down the beautiful West Coast of America. In their honour, I would like to turn back the clock to 1984 and present to you the classic pop hit from Nena (aka Gabriele Susanne Kerner) entitled 99 Luftballons [sic]. A remake of sorts was done in 2009, on the 25th Anniversary of the song.
Your lofty Reader Tips are welcome, as always, in the comments.

European Trudeaupia

entitlement generation 7 Comments

Every few days a podcast is released by BBC News entitled From Our Correspondent. The stories from around the world are sometimes weird but most often fascinating.
In this recent episode, pay close attention to the first two segments: the first is from Athens and the second from Strasbourg. Listen to the repeated tales of corruption and greed and incompetence. Then ask yourself whether the big government proponents in Canada want anything different.

Sweet Crude Vagaries…

Science 14 Comments

…of oil prices:

…
In a competitive market, the price of oil would be linked to the marginal cost of the next barrel. In other words, the price for the first 88 barrels would be affected by the cost of producing the 89th barrel, in effect the cost of replacing each barrel used.
But in the world of oil, it’s hard to say what that replacement cost is. Producing oil is not like churning out computer chips, where costs are similar everywhere.
In Canada, it costs somewhere between $40 and $60 a barrel to mine and melt the viscous goo known as tar sands that environmentalists would rather leave in the ground. Yet in the Gulf of Mexico, where giant drilling rigs plumb deep waters, the cost of finding and developing oilfields can be relatively modest. Chevron, for example, has a $7.5 billion platform that will tap into a half-billion-barrel field at an average cost of about $15 a barrel. In Iraq, it’s even cheaper…
…There is no free market. There are obstacles everywhere. Pipelines. Politics. Oil spills. Warfare. They make it hard to figure out a marginal price for the next barrel of oil because it’s not clear whether the cheapest barrel can get anywhere near a tanker, refinery or consumer.
Then there’s the demand side, where needs and habits are so ingrained that we don’t respond quickly to rising prices…
The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries is devoted to the idea of managing — or manipulating — oil markets.
Though Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi emerged from the cartel’s cantankerous June meeting and declared it the worst one ever, when it comes to oil prices, OPEC is having its best year ever…
Some argue that an era of limits has begun. Yes, there is a peak to world oil production out there somewhere, because we’re gobbling up the plants and plankton that have been simmering for millions of years in the sedimentary cooker faster than the Earth can replace them. But we keep postponing that peak — by finding new fields, getting more oil out of old ones or clamping down on consumption.
Still, supplies could remain tight because of fast consumption growth in China, where every year it’s increasing by more than half a million barrels a day, and in India. The world has about 3 million to 4 million barrels a day of spare capacity right now, but prices edge up when that cushion shrinks.
The only way to restore balance in coming years will be through higher prices…

Sunday Morning Laugh

Baiting The Left 35 Comments

Now that our national holiday is over, it doesn’t feel inappropriate to post this “gem”.     h/t Steve

From the video description: “On Wednesday, Feb. 9, 2011, Liberal MPs unveiled their new ‘gender neutral, secular, bilingual’ O’Canada.”
Here’s the Chief Fool’s website.
Incidentally, about a year before, the Royal Canadian Air Farce featured something similar. Clearly Carolyn Bennett didn’t get the joke!

Unproductive Canadian Dreams/Productive American Ones

Little Known Facts 31 Comments

William Watson spots what’s wrong with too many of our “best and brightest”:

Endless folly of innovation policy
…
My own hunch is that you get successful innovation when obsessive people can make lots of money doing it and be celebrated for their success. We’re still some ways from that in Canada. Most of the often very bright undergraduates I talk to don’t tell me their plans for their lives, but most that do tell want to work for NGOs and save the world. Good for them! Good for the NGOs and the world! But not so good, I suspect, for Canadian innovation and productivity

Another view on a related subject:

America’s Apple economy widens the winner-loser gap
…
The big winners from Apple’s innovation were the 6,101 engineers and other professional workers in the United States who made more than $525-million. That’s more than double what the U.S. non-professionals made, and significantly more than the total earnings of all of Apple’s foreign employees.
Here in microcosm is why America is so ambivalent about globalization and the technology revolution. The populist fear that even America’s most brilliant innovations are creating more jobs abroad than they are at home is clearly true. In fact, the reality may be even grimmer than the Tea Party realizes, since more than half the American iPod jobs are relatively poorly paid and low-skilled.
But America has winners, too: the engineers and other American professionals who work for Apple, whose healthy paycheques are partly due to the bottom-line benefit the company gains from cheap foreign labour. Apple’s shareholders have done even better…

RIM Update: Since the company pops up in the “Comments”:

Under fire, RIM agrees to review executive structure
…
Boy Genius Report, a technology website that follows RIM closely, posted a copy of the letter on Thursday [June 30] that accused RIM’s senior management of, among other things, not focusing enough on user experience, giving developers bad tools to work with, and running a work environment that feels like “Soviet-era government workplaces.”
The website claims the letter’s author is “a high-level RIM employee,” but did not identify the person. The letter, addressed to Mr. Lazaridis and Mr. Balsillie, purports to express what “many” employees at the company think, but are afraid to say publicly.
“Almost every project is falling further and further behind schedule at a time when we absolutely must deliver great, solid products on time,” the anonymous author writes. “We urge you to make bold decisions about our organizational structure, about our culture and most importantly our products…

Mr Balsillie has been doing his own bit to help save the world–eye off the ball perhaps? Along with Bill Gates?

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