Limps per Capita

Uncategorized 20 Comments

Every city has one … the place where “progressives” go to feed:

The joke I have among friends is that there is one statistic not covered by official sources, but which can be seen anytime one drives down 20th Street or parts of 22nd Street in Saskatoon. These streets have the highest “limp” rate in Canada … that is, I’ve never seen so many people who limp, hobble, or shuffle along in my life. I feel sorry for some of them, as they are the blamelessly dispossessed such as schizophrenics or physically disabled through no fault of their own. But … and it’s a big “but”; many are victims of vice … drinking, fighting, crime, and impaired operation of vehicles. If you’ve worked or lived among this “class”, you find out pretty fast that most “limps” go hand in hand with the battle scars and rap-sheet.

The Compromisers, Con’t

Radioactive 84 Comments

Yaacov Ben Moshe examines the question of Israel’s will to survive. It’s a trait that’s not entirely evident these days.

My last post spoke to the way in which Israel’s public image has become compromised by the media’s constant compromise with evil. The mainstream media is, at this point, paralyzed by the, vertebra-popping, ligament snapping contortions it has put itself through to convince itself it is being “fair” when what has actually been needed was not fairness but honesty and accuracy. Fairness, as practiced by the media (as I show in that post) is neither honest nor accurate but a delusional attempt never to offend the most easily offended party even as it cares nothing about offending the most open and least easily offended party.
Is it not possible that the malaise of the Israelis is a product of the same process on a cultural scale? As Neville Chamberlain proved for all time, appeasement and compromise with evil is not prudent, it is wasteful and stupid. But, even worse than that, it is debilitating to the compromiser. It literally compromises his legitimate defense mechanisms and disarms his ability to act.
[…]
Could Olmert, Livni and their government possibly still have a forlorn hope of convincing the Arabs that Israel has the right to exist? In the entire history of the planet earth, rights without the exercise (not just the possession) of power has never availed anything for anyone. For a Jew, of all the perpetual victims, to think he will be the first case, is lunacy. Buy a history book. Look it up on the Internet. Ask any Arab.
Are they afraid of getting the Caliphateist Arabs (the world’s frothiest collection of rage-oholics) angry? Are they afraid of making refugees out of a people that has held that title as a holy sinecure for sixty years? The so called Palestinians are the most murderous, longest suffering, loudest complaining, least productive and most resistant to resettlement refugees ever. It would, perhaps, be more accurate to call them “aggressfugees”.

RTWT.

Reader Tips

Reader Tips 78 Comments

I’ve a busy 2 days ahead, including a road trip. Activity will be very slow here until Sunday, unless one of our guest bloggers has something they’d like to contribute.
Your tips in the comments, as usual.

Y2Kyoto: According To Plan

More Money Than Brains 57 Comments

Via HotAir;

Canada has an estimated 1.6 trillion barrels of oil on its territory, much of it locked in tough-to-excavate tar sands in the province of Alberta. By comparison, oil-rich Saudi Arabia has an estimated 270 billion barrels left. It isn’t even close.
Yet, according to the Financial Times of London, Canada’s government recently sent U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates a letter of warning that it might not be able to sell the U.S. any of its oil, which the Pentagon desperately needs for national defense.
For that, you can thank the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, passed with great gusto and self-righteousness by the Democratic Congress.

Chris Horner;

So let’s do a quick review of the energy bill so far: environmental degradation, rampant food inflation, and a potential Third World famine due to corn ethanol; increased potential for mercury exposure from mandatory CFL bulbs; and the prospect of a ticked-off major trading partner on our northern border and an increased dependence on ever-more-expensive Middle Eastern crude. If this is the best the Beltway class can do, hopefully the public will become more inclined to trust the private sector and free markets to find solutions.

Law of unintended consequences? Hardly. This is Law To Enrich Socialists, and all is unfolding as planned;

Criticisms of Environment Minister John Baird for the vagueness of the moves announced this week to force oilsands to sequester CO2, and prevent construction of “dirty” coal plants reflects the Alice in Wonderland quality of the climate-change non-debate. Opposition parties brayed that he had not been “tough” enough. Media headlines suggested that big emitters had “won.”
But nowhere in either the policy or the attacks would you find any suggestion that any measures, whether tough or not, would have the slightest impact on the global climate. How did we get to this ridiculous mess? It is all inextricably tied to the remarkable job that the Left has done in the past 20 years to rescue itself from the brink of extinction by exploiting environmental concerns.
[…]
The old/new Left was quick to seize upon the potential of climate change at the huge Brundtland follow-up at Rio in 1992. Rio was organized by Brundtland commissioner Maurice Strong, a long-time committed Canadian socialist who was the strategic mastermind of the new environmental Left. From Rio emerged the processes that led to the Kyoto accord.
Why would governments support the theory of potentially disastrous man-made climate change? It was a combination of the success of the environmental Left — in particular activist non-governmental organizations — in stoking the concerns of the electorate, and of the desire of bureaucrats and policy-makers to stay relevant, busy and in power. This in turn gave them an interest in supporting the NGOs’ radical message, which was amplified by government funding, and by allowing them into the policy-making process. The policy process became self-feeding.
This orientation helps explain why the abject failure of Kyoto was not taken as an indication that such processes were fatally flawed. Rather it was seen as a justification for “redoubling efforts,” and for having bigger conferences in more exotic locales.

They were raising those glasses at the swim-up bar to us, dear suckers.

“Confessed Unlawful Activities” – Breaking News

Uncategorized 99 Comments

(Bumped to top – welcome, JohnGormleyLive listeners)
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely…” – Baron Acton (1834–1902)
In a disclosure eerily reminiscent of the Devine caucus fraud scandal, Saskatchewan residents were shocked today by a political firestorm brought forth by NDP Justice critic Frank Quenell in the Saskatchewan Legislature.

Premier Brad Wall was in New York today (undoubtedly meeting with Eliot Spitzer’s spin doctors as to how to handle the political fallout), and was unavailable for comment.
SDA will keep you posted as this story winds it’s way through the court system.

You Can Dig, But You Can’t Hide

Military 37 Comments

Raytheon rocks;

Raytheon has developed and tested a new conventional warhead technology to defeat hardened and deeply buried bunkers. The new technology, called Tandem Warhead System, consists of a shaped-charge precursor warhead combined with a follow- through penetrator explosive charge.
During a Jan. 31 test, the newly developed 1,000-pound-class warhead set a record when it punched through 19 feet, 3 inches of a 20-foot, 330-ton, steel rod-reinforced concrete block rated at 12,600 pounds per square inch compressive strength. In fewer than 10 milliseconds, the explosion delivered into the target more than 110 million foot-pounds of energy via a high- velocity jet of molten metal.
Raytheon’s large shape-charged test was the first against a target built to withstand more than 10,000 psi. Most conventional weapons in the same weight class as Raytheon’s precursor warhead cannot penetrate targets rated at more than 6,000 psi.

(h/t reader Charles MacDonald)
Update – More Raytheon cool! The Killer Bee.

This is what passes for a documentary?

Uncategorized 23 Comments

An hour-long advertisement for Stein and Lang’s one-sided pre-emptive re-write of history. It should have been called REVEALED: The Liberals’ Oh-So-Convenient Attempt To Cover Their Disgustingly Cynical and Self-Interested Tails On How We Went To War.
Given the production company’s previous work, I was expecting so much more than Scott Reid and John McCallum scurrying for cracks in the wall when the light was turned on.
(Ed note: Don’t miss reading the rest of this post at the link provided. – Kate)

Featured Comment

Featured Comment 69 Comments

ET;

Jim Travers of the Star writes:

Conservatives were as skilfully swift in positioning Dion as an impotent environmentalist as they were framing him as a weak leader.”

No, Mr. Pro-Liberal MSM pundit, Dion’s position as an impotent environmentalist and weak leader isn’t due to the Conservatives. It’s due to himself.
I went to an all candidates meeting in Toronto Centre last night. The St. Lawrence Theatre takes over 500, and it was packed. At first I thought I’d wandered into a British SitCom.
There was a troop of medallion bedecked grannies singing Songs of Peace.
Various impoverished and earnest activists, looking like Bertie Worster Without Jeeves – handing out flyers insisting that a basic income and house are a Human Right (particularly if both are provided by the Working Taxpayer. A deeply committed 9/11 Denier (It was Bush Who Did It). Others Against The Imperialist USA. Unreal.
Rae, on stage, is smug, smooth and polished. He deals with his Years of Deficit by removing it from criticism..by beginning his comments by a joking reference to it. That acknowledgment, which turns it into a joke, removes it from the table. How does he deal with Dion?
He deftly turns the tables. He accused both the NDP and CPC of having brochures that depict Dion in unflattering images, as weak, as.. The NDP countered that the images weren’t altered. Rae then acknowledged Dion as a ‘nerd’ but continued that it wasn’t ‘nice’ to focus on such personal things.
This ignores that he defines the CPC as The American Republican Party.
I got the impression – but I’m possibly biased as it is actually my opinion – that the Liberal Party is acknowledging Dion as a nerd and leaving him outside to play on his own in the sandbox. They can’t do anything about him. They dare not have an election now (to get rid of him) because their loss in seats would be far more disastrous to the Party.
So, they’ll let Dion make a fool of himself, with his claims that ‘we can’t have an election now because it’s snowing’. Or, ‘because it’s Easter’. But they won’t let him have an election (which he wants) because of that disastrous seat loss.
Therefore, they’ll put up with him, and even, isolate themselves more and more from him. Token acknowledgments as Our Leader. But, I’m saying the Real Leader is going to be Rae. And the image he’s going to present will be Experienced, Wise, Smooth and above all, Genial, Friendly, Open. Above all- open. In contrast to Harper’s shyness and ‘coldness’. Rae is going to be The People’s Man.
Their other strategy is to define the CPC and Harper as Corrupt. Their tactic is endless accusations. All unfounded. But they don’t care; the Public Image promoted by their faithful MSM friends is all that matters.

h/t

The Compromisers

Media 12 Comments

“In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube.” – Ayn Rand

Yaacov Ben Moshe;

Fairness and its often silent partner “evenhandedness” are the fulcrum by which the media’s good intentions are flipped into the upside-down world of moral relativism and political correctness. The media’s job is not to find the mid-point of competing political agendas, but to report the news regardless of how that plays out for or against any particular group’s interests. In the name of “fairness” our media too often aim for a sort of “average” position between opposing groups. Whether those opposing groups are political parties, cultures that are competing for survival or warring armies, the “mid point” between them is seldom anything but a barren no man’s land. The sort of fairness that we find routinely in the media is, at best a morally blind position based on reporting both sides equally credibly and credulously. The reason that no one seems to be satisfied that we are not getting fair and honest representations of events is, simply, that we are not.
This tautology of universal offense is one of the hand-maidens to the most dangerous public delusion in Western Civilization: moral relativism, which holds that no set of values or opinion or culture is superior to any other. This radical variant of multiculturalism, which refuses to judge other cultures by our own (or any) standards, dominates much of the media and academia.
It seems safe to say that in all of human history there has never been a conflict in which both parties were exactly as right (or good – or nice) as the other. In truth, the morally neutral approach actively undermines the side with the most moral clarity and confers an unfair advantage on any side that is less democratic, ethical and open. So why is the media intent on making believe that all causes are equal?

Out Of The Fog

What He Said 37 Comments

A “brain dead Liberal” changes his opinion.

And, I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was it? I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.
I’d observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.

Read the whole thing.
h/t to the Anchoress;

Enjoy all the havoc you’ve just created, sir, in your little world! You may find that you’ve just given others around you permission to free themselves, too. Maybe the word “liberal” can even be reclaimed, someday, to once again mean “broad minded, open and fair,” which is a far cry from what it means, these days.

The Road To Totalitarianism

What He Said 42 Comments

Paul Tuns has an article that some of you may find useful if you wish to bring friends and acquaintances up to date on the sordid history of CHRC cases and rulings.

While the high-profile complaints against Maclean’s and Levant have garnered the most attention, two other complaints were made public just before the Christmas break that should also worry Canadians. Rob Wells, an Edmonton man, has filed formal complaints with the Canadian Human Rights Commission against both Catholic Insight magazine and the Christian Heritage Party, as well as its leader Ron Gray, over their comments about homosexuality.
Although the magazine only went public with the complaint in December, Wells filed his action against Catholic Insight last February. The nine-point complaint listed fragments of columns and news published in the magazine dating back to 1994 that are alleged to have caused offence to homosexuals. Wells did not provide any context, nor any reference even to the editions of the magazine from which the supposedly offending passages were taken, yet the folks at the magazine were expected to file a prompt reply.
[…]
The editors at Catholic Insight want to defend themselves by arguing the truth of their statements, but, sadly, truth doesn’t matter.
Rather, Catholic Insight must defend its right to report and comment on current events (freedom of the press) and the right to hold and express its sincerely held religious views (freedom of religion); that is, it must defend its Charter-protected rights against claims that expressing these facts and opinions causes offence to some supposedly marginalized groups and thus, are deserving of suppression. So there is an official view of certain issues; certain politically correct pieties must never be questioned and if that line is not toed, private citizens can utilize state-run institutions to silence and even punish those with dissenting views.
[…]
Gray, like de Valk, does not hate homosexuals, nor does he wish them any harm, but both maintain that in a free and democratic society, debates about public policies – like the definition of marriage – are precisely that: debates. By definition, debates have more than one side and Catholic Insight and the Christian Heritage Party have been presenting arguments not against homosexuals, but against their claims to marriage.
Gray told The Interim that the Canadian Human Rights Commission – or any HRC – has “absolutely no jurisdiction” to tell a political party what it can and cannot communicate and that ultimately, voters will judge the messages of a political party. “I really think this is a crucial case, because if an agency of the government, which the CHRC is, can tell a political party what it may and may not include in its political statements, we have gone way down the road to totalitarianism.”

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