There Are No Libertarians In Foxholes

What He Said 45 Comments

Patrick S Lasswell meets a shotgun armed drug dealer – outside his home; (link fixed)

While running around in my PJ’s armed exclusively with a flashlight, telephone, and civic virtue, my libertarian interest in keeping the police from having military weapons died of exposure. When the the kook drove by and kept pointing his lights at my position, I was all for the 911 operator getting access to laser armed satellites or police helicopters with precision guided munitions. The notion that patrol cars might have AR-15 rifles onboard seemed prudent, not an infringement. All apologies to Glenn Reynolds, but I wouldn’t choose to face deranged shotgun toting citizens armed only with a pistol, why should the cops?

The Richest Target, Least Defended

Little Known Facts 10 Comments

Though no longer the chief delinquent of Europe, and though not much thought is given to its strategic position, Germany is still Europe’s center of gravity, territorially contiguous to more nations than any state other than Russia, with compact interior lines of communication, Western Europe’s largest population, and Europe’s leading economy.
Facts like these assert themselves through every kind of historical fluctuation, even if America now sees Germany, the way stop for airlifters en route to Iraq and Afghanistan, as a kind of giant aircraft carrier with sausages. But Germany is no doubt the subject of far deeper consideration on the one hand by Russia and on the other by Jihadists.

Read the whole thing here. (link fixed – sorry!)

Stevie – I Hear Your Name Being Called

Political Animal 115 Comments

The Mulroney – Schreiber media frenzy is less a scandal in waiting than it is a speculation-driven Liberal hope bubble. It’s too old, the basis too flimsy, the source too compromised, too little money is alleged to be involved, but most important of all – it’s already been investigated.
And then there’s the involvement of journalist/police informant Stevie Cameron. If ever a scandal had an Achilles in heels…
But I do like Mulroney’s idea.;

After a tough and lengthy battle against these false and horrendously libellous accusations, the government of the day had to admit that they had absolutely no evidence to support them, and apologized to me and my family. In addition, they had to reimburse me of all my legal and other expenses.
Twelve years later, the same people at the CBC and at certain other media organizations who were at the origin of the 1995 accusations are still conducting their vendetta. Last Friday, Prime Minister Stephen Harper decided that he needed the counsel of an independent third party to advise him on the course of action to follow after new allegations were made in an affidavit filed by Karlheinz Schreiber from his prison cell where he is detained pending the execution of an extradition order confirmed twice by the Supreme Court of Canada.
I will fully co-operate with the special adviser soon to be appointed by the Prime Minister, but I have come to the conclusion that in order to finally put this matter to rest and expose all the facts and the role played by all the people involved, from public servants to elected officials, from lobbyists to the police authorities, as well as journalists, the only solution is for the government to launch a full-fledged public commission of inquiry which would cover the period from 1988 to today.

(Caveat – so long as the Globe, the CBC, CTV, and the Liberal Party of Canada are presented with the bill should he again be cleared.)
But, whatever. I come not to praise Mulroney – my fondness for everything Progressive Conservative finally evaporated with the Bristol Aerospace CF-18 contract – but to provide you a dedicated thread.
Stay on topic.

Venezuela: The Good News Never Ends

Little Known Facts 18 Comments

LaTimes;

A nation at the crossroads of South America, the Caribbean, North America and Europe, Venezuela’s location is ideal. Borders? Long, scantly populated and porous. Financial system? Large and with easy-to-evade governmental controls. Telecommunications, ports and airports? The best that oil money can buy. U.S. influence? Nil. Corrupt politicians, cops, judges and military officers? Absolutely: Transparency International ranked Venezuela a shameful 162 out of 179 counties on its corruption perception index. Chavez’s demonstrated interest in confronting criminal networks during his eight years in power? Not much.
While this situation has so far been rather invisible to the rest of the world, it is patently clear to those in charge of fighting transnational crime. Anti-trafficking officials in Europe, the United States, Asia and other Latin American countries are paying unprecedented attention to Venezuela. These officials are not particularly interested in Venezuelan politics or in Chavez’s policies. All they care about is that the tentacles of these global criminal networks are spreading from Venezuela into their countries with enormous power and at great speed.

A Plot To Divert Attention From Their Toys

Roadkill 11 Comments

Via Slashdot;

About 1,800 brand new 300-GB or 500-GB external hard drives made for Maxtor in Thailand were found to have trojan horse malwares pre-installed (autorun.inf and ghost.pif). When the HD is in use, these forward information on the disk to two websites in Beijing, China: www.nice8.org or www.we168.org. The article implies that authorities believe the Chinese government is behind the trojans. A later article pins down the point of infection to a subcontractor company in China. A couple of months back the Register was reporting on pre-installed malware detected on Maxtor disks sold in the Netherlands. This earlier report was downplayed by a Seagate spokesman.”

Taken By Storm

Climate Cult 72 Comments
The 2nd edition of Chris Essex and Ross McKitrick’s Taken By
Storm: the Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming, can be now ordered from Canada stores. (International distribution next spring.) The first edition sold out.

From the foreword by the distinguished Sir Mortimer Long-Bore;

I had initially supposed this to be a book of independent thinking and skeptical attitude. My fears were well-founded. The authors recklessly question the widely-accepted doctrines of global warming and the conclusions of the very eminent International Expert Panel on Climate Change [sic]. This is deeply disturbing to me. We cannot allow people to undermine the consensus position on global warming, after all the effort that went into imposing it.
The greenhouse effect is lifting the global temperature to dangerous levels. This is proven by elementary Newtonian physics as used in our most advanced computer climate models. The global temperature is warmer today than ever before in the planet’s history; modern computerized climate models can predict future warming with impressive numerical precision; the greenhouse “fingerprint” has been positively identified in global temperature data. We have complete certainty that our future is imperiled. We observe that sea levels are rising, storms are increasingly violent, droughts and floods ravage the land, animals are dying, and the Arctic ice cap is gone, I am told. One reels at the horror of it all.
The authors are wrong to question any of this. Morally wrong. Nor are the authors even qualified to make commentary on this sublime topic. One is an applied mathematician who apparently works on topics in radiation and fluid dynamics. The other is an economist who studies environmental policy. What claim has either to expertise on global warming or climate change? For tutelage on issues of such importance I counsel reliance on the authority of qualified experts. You may find, as I did, the book An Inconvenient Truth to be greatly informative in this respect.

Just in time for your Christmas lawn chair!
Update – Dr. McKitrick responds to “critics” (that’s a polite word for it) in the comments.

Standing Beside Norm Kirby

What He Said 9 Comments

Today I will take my children to the Remembrance Day ceremonies, just like my father used to take me to the remembrance ceremonies in The Netherlands where I grew up as a child. The memories of those are vivid: a sober ceremony, some music, a speech by the mayor, veterans and survivors placing some wreaths in front of the statue on the square and a silence of two minutes followed by the national anthem. But as opposed to Canadians, our day of remembrance is May 4, the day marking the eve of liberation day; the day Canadian troops liberated the North and West of The Netherlands sixty-two years ago. But there is another more major difference between these two days of remembrance: most of the victims we commemorated weren’t military, but civilian.

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