In tonight’s musical selection English satirist Noel Coward sings, with lilting, caustic nonchalance, that There Are Bad Times Just Around The Corner.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.
It’s Probably Nothing
(Related*)
Distinguished Symposia
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this week’s
distinguished lecture, documentary & interview symposium.
Tonight, for your delectation, here is Mr. George P. Shultz
being interviewed by Charlie Rose on Monday evening last.
We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans
[F]rom the evidence of alternative energy development, it seems far more plausible that the key problem has been government failure not market failure. Indeed, the market failure assumption has been typically based on the following premise: there is demand for alternative energy technologies but the market does not provide them. That is, market participants devote few or no resources to alternatives and create innovations with only limited application. Therefore government has to step in to induce the technological development the market fails to create. But the historical record shows that government has spent literally billions of dollars and has achieved almost no obvious benefits as a result. If indeed the market spends little or nothing to create nothing, while the government spends large social resources for the same result, then it would seem government failure, not market failure is a greater concern.
The History of U.S. Alternative Energy Development Programs: A Study of Government Failure (pdf)
Via.
“This is our generation’s Sputnik moment.”
Joe B. writes – “The meaning of ‘sputnik’ in Russian is ‘fellow-traveler’.”
From the comments;
I remember sputnik. I was about 4 years old, and my older brother took us outside to try and watch it pass overhead. I don’t remember actually seeing it, but a lot of people did keep an eye on it. Obama is right about it being a sputnik moment, but not in the way he perceives it. Sputnik scared the living daylights out of the general public, because no one was certain the commies wouldn’t load a bunch of them up with nukes. If they actually had developed the technology to that level, the west would have been seriously screwed. All the leaders of the day were old war horses, with no fear of launching an attack.
The current sputnik moment happened when the west realized we’ve allowed the commies to take control of the world economy. This might not frighten people as much as the threat of nuclear destruction, but it should. Death from a nuclear explosion is mostly quick and painless, while death from economic domination will be slow and torturous. Our society will not tolerate it, and the only way out will be war. So, instead of a quick and clean fight, with a slim chance of survival, we have a long drawn out prelude of painful economic decay, followed by a war with no chance of survival.
Heh. “Is it any coincidence that the acronym for Winning The Future is WTF?”
Faces Of Fear
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
Michael Ignatieff;
“I’ve seen the fear in the eyes of the Canadian family. If the Liberal party believes in anything, it’s to take that fear away.”
Dick Morris: Teachers Unions are Directly to Blame for America’s Failed Education System
As a final post at the tail end of my guest blogging gig I would like to share this video I put together from a discussion yesterday between Dick Morris and Dennis Miller. Most of it is focused on America’s Failed Education System but I think there is direct relevance to what’s going on here in Canada. It seems that barely a week goes by when we don’t hear of one provincial teachers’ union or another doing something that is clearly not in the best interest of the students. In the interview, Morris pulls no punches in his disdain for American teachers’ unions and provides example after example why.
Related: New Jersey Governor Chris Christie proposes forfeiting raises and losing tenure for the worst unionized teachers. My opinion: A good start but in the REAL world NO ONE should have tenure.
A big thanks to Kate for the opportunity I was given and much thanks to all of you, the regular participants here at SDA. The conversations were most enlightening and I learned a lot. A pretty good way to start 2011, I think!
Open Season
Reader Tips
In tonight’s tips music, from the 1958 album Live At Newport, Duke Ellington and his Orchestra perform Mr. Gentle and Mr. Cool.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.
The Bottle Genie
“The University of East Anglia’s Climategate inquiries were not sufficiently transparent and failed to properly investigate some key issues, the Commons Science and Technology Committee has concluded.”
How Liberal Journalists Think
h/t Michael P.
Blog Notes
10 days of (very successful) shows, followed by a 29 hour suicide run, and I’m home. Normal blogging will resume later today after I check back in with the news cycle and clear the road buzz from my head.
Thanks to our guest bloggers once again for a job well done!
Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach Exiting Stage Left
Fast Eddie is leaving the scene before the door hits him . . . you know the rest.
Here’s his official resignation (oddly, in point form). In his comments notice that he couldn’t help himself from taking a [very unfair] shot at Danielle Smith and the Wildrose Alliance
• There is a profound danger that the next election campaign will focus on personality and US style negative, attack politics that is directed at me personally.
• The danger is that it could allow for an extreme right party to disguise itself as a moderate party by focussing on personality – on me personally.
• This type of US style wedge politics is coming into Canada, and it comes at our peril.
• Albertans deserve to have better level of public debate on our policy options.
If he had stayed, do you think the Conservatives would have been defeated by the Wildrose Alliance? Now that he’s going, can the Conservatives regroup and salvage a win?
Live Twitter comments about his departure can be seen here.
Update: Interesting follow-up discussion between Charles Adler, Ezra Levant, and Kevin Libin.
Also, one of SDA’s most eloquent writers (and speakers), Gord Tulk, shares some very insightful analysis, far superior to any of the usual dreck one gets from the MSM!
Milking Canada
This should be a pivotal moment in Canada’s irrational defence of supply management. There are signs that countries like Japan and Korea are prepared to undergo structural reforms to their agricultural sectors, in exchange for a seat at the TPP table. If all the members of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation organization sign on, it would mean a free trade deal encompassing half the world’s economy. Yet Canada, an APEC member, remains hostage to 7,500 dairy farmers in Quebec and 5,000 in Ontario, accounting for less than 1% of the Canadian economy.
An Interview with Melanie Phillips
Melanie Phillips is a British author of Jewish descent who has been speaking out against Leftist and Islamic totalitarianism for several decades now. Here’s the podcast of an interview she had last month with Roger Aronoff of Accuracy in Media. It starts off slowly but quickly gets most interesting! If you prefer, you can read the transcript of the interview.
The Propagandists
Talking head number one: “At six o’clock, no more doubt: climate change is happening, and we are to blame!”
Talking head number two: “Leading scientists predict that by the end of the century some parts of Europe will be too hot to live in!”
That’s awfully hot.
Reader Tips
If French is the language most suited to the delivery of wistful love songs, German is perhaps the best language for the Sturm und Drang themes of heavy metal music. As if to prove it, here are Völklingen’s own Cindy & Bert – who were husband and wife at the time – delivering a scorching performance of Black Sabbath’s Paranoia, or, as they called it, Der Hund von Baskerville. Jawohl.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.
Amazing Photos of a Destroyed City
Photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre have published a photo exposé of the ruins of a once great city. Is it Baghdad? Is it Kabul? Find out here. What do you think caused this destruction?
Who are we?
A few excerpts from another, er, killer post from Publius:
A Canadian Value
A Pequiste punctures a Canadian illusion:A group of Sikhs was turned away from the Quebec legislature for carrying ceremonial daggers in an incident Tuesday that served as a flashpoint in the province’s emotional debate about multiculturalism.
[…]
Louise Beaudoin, the PQ’s designated critic for secularism, noted that the province’s politicians have never subscribed to the charter vision — in fact, many here view it as a threat to Quebec’s culture. Quebec is the only province that has never supported the Constitution.
“Multiculturalism is not a Quebec value,” Beaudoin told reporters.
“It may be a Canadian one — but it’s not a Quebec one.Some conservatives might be impressed by Louise Beaudoin’s militant rejection of multiculturalism. They should not be. Mme Beaudoin is not rejecting the cultural relativism offered by the multiculturalists. Instead, as a Quebec nationalist, she is asserting the superiority of her tribal culture over others.
The PQ is a party dedicated to the independence of Quebec on the basis of ethnic nationalism. While expressed, and practiced, in a far more civilized form than that seen in the Balkans, or the Middle East, it has as much intellectual validity as the primitive tribalism of those regions. An independent Quebec would be no freer, no strong, no safer and no richer a place than a Quebec within the Canadian union. There is no reason for it but ordinary chauvinism.
Superficially, Quebec nationalism may seem little different from the patriotism of the Rest of Canada…
Under the rubric of multiculturalism this friction is not seen as inevitable and understandable. Instead it is viewed as a product of deep seated bigotry. To the multiculturalist all cultures – and therefore all cultural values – are seen as equally valid. To object to one set of values is not ignorance, or a difference of opinion, but racism. The accusation of racism is tool, used quite often, to silence those making even the most innocuous comments about other cultures…
The Left has drawn the cultural battle lines to their advantage. Too many conservatives (and a few libertarians) have accepted its terms. We cannot fall for the trap. The Left has decreed that to oppose multiculturalism is bigotry. The instinctive reaction of some will be: “Fine, I’m a bigot. Make the most of it.”
Finding non-western cultures strange is not bigotry, it is human…
Climate Shift in Context
The warming of the past half dozen decades is nothing … absolutely nothing when compared to the massive shifts that have occured during the past 25,000 years:
But what about the magnitude and rates of climates change? How do past temperature oscillations compare with recent global warming (1977-1998) or with warming periods over the past millennia. The answer to the question of magnitude and rates of climate change can be found in the δ18O and borehole temperature data.