"Let’s start this brief review of 2014 on the positive side, with a quote from the new head of TD Bank, Bahrat Masrani, about the wonderful diversity of Canadian business. Comparing himself with his predecessor, Ed Clark, Mr. Masrani noted: “I was brought up a Hindu, Ed was brought up a hippie.”" ...
... One prediction for next year: The great climate policy meeting in Paris will come to an agreement. To keep talking.
JAMES: “Rape Culture" ... If you want to know what “Rape Culture” really looks like, just pay a visit to Islamic-State-held territory in Iraq and Syria.
... Now compare and contrast with the confected, faux grievances of the West’s oppressed female Social Justice Warriors, as they battle against such appalling injustices as: their insufficient representation on bank notes ... not having been given as many Nobel-prizes as men have ...
MILO: "GameGate" ... Gamers are the only fandom ever to mount a sustained revolt against social justice warriors riding in to “save” their hobby from “misogyny” and other invented offences.
... GamerGate, indirectly, had a huge effect on feminism in the popular imagination this year, because it showed third-wave feminism up for what it is: a hateful, bullying, authoritarian creed of funless cultural Marxism. ...
JAMES: “Torture” ... can you not see something effete, decadent and self-defeating in our enthusiasm first for washing our dirty linen in public (as the Democrat Senate report was so eager to do)...
In a recent interview with National Public Radio, .... Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said his company “has a very strong view that we should make decisions in politics based on facts. And the facts of climate change are not in question anymore. Everyone understands climate change is occurring, and the people who oppose it are really hurting our children and our grandchildren and making the world a much worse place. We should not be aligned with such people. They’re just literally lying.”It's not surprising that an Obama advisor+bank-roller and green philanthropist would take a leftist climate hysterical position. But it is disturbing that a company that has such huge propaganda power at its disposal has openly declared such blatant political bias.
... Pope Francis steeped his Christmas message to the world Thursday in sadness for those with little cause for joy — abused children, refugees, hostages and others suffering from violence in the Middle East, Africa, Ukraine and elsewhere. ...And, from the Prime Minister - pray for our soldiers killing ISIS barbarians in Iraq
Looks like an excellent read. I'm buying it.Making the world a better place — by using more fossil fuels
Wrapping our minds around climate change
The sustainability myth
... Jurors may have split into bitter, screaming factions. They may have been trapped for days by a single, stubborn holdout. In the close quarters and high stress of sequestration, they may even have been tormented by simmering sexual tensions. ...
Anthony (A.M.) Daniels (born 11 October 1949), who generally uses the pen name Theodore Dalrymple, is an English writer and retired prison doctor and psychiatrist. He worked in a number of Sub-Saharan African countries as well as in the east end of London. Before his retirement in 2005, he worked in City Hospital, Birmingham and Winson Green Prison in inner-city Birmingham, England. ...Daniel Hannan's take:
... The doctor’s oeuvre takes pessimism about human nature to a new level. Yet its tone is never patronising, shrill or hectoring. Once you get past the initial shock of reading about battered wives, petty crooks and junkies from a non-Left perspective, you find humanity and pathos.Essays.
... It’s striking that many of those who are the most relentlessly upbeat about the perfectibility of man ... are in person sour and humourless. Theodore Dalrymple, by contrast, is gloomy in theory, but sunny in practice. Perhaps conservatism is the secret of inner peace.
... Violence, vulgarity, and educational failure: three aspects of modern English life that are so obvious and evident that it requires little observational power to discern them. Indeed, it requires far more mental effort and agility not to discern them, to screen them out of one's consciousness ...A little long but well worth the read.
It is worth examining the mental mechanisms that liberal intellectuals use to disguise the truth from themselves and others, and to ask why they do so.
First, there is outright denial. ...
Second, there is the tendentious historical comparison or precedent. ...
Third, once the facts are finally admitted under the duress of accumulated evidence, their moral significance is denied or perverted....
Every liberal prescription worsened the problem that it was ostensibly designed to solve. But every liberal intellectual had to deny that obvious consequence or lose his [deeply ingrained world view] ...
... Environmental zealots like to pretend B.O. is some massive corporate conspiracy run by a few fat cat plutocrats with cigars and evil laughs, but if that was the case they’d hardly have engineered a massive collapse in their wealth just before Christmas. B.O. is more like the weather: just because it’s sunny and warm today doesn’t mean it’s going to stay that way. And what autocrat would bet their economy on the weather?
... Fracking, as it is known, was heavily promoted as a source of economic revival for depressed communities along New York’s border with Pennsylvania, and Mr. Cuomo had once been poised to embrace it.
... For Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, the decision on fracking — which was immediately hailed by environmental and liberal groups — seemed likely to help repair his ties to his party’s left wing.
... the acting state health commissioner, Dr. Howard A. Zucker, said the examination had found “significant public health risks” associated with fracking. “We cannot afford to make a mistake,” he said. “The potential risks are too great. In fact, they are not even fully known.” [Risks too great? Not fully known? In spite of a million plus fracked wells across the country, over 60 years, with no significant adverse environmental effects?]
... As he traveled around the state, Mr. Cuomo was hounded by protesters opposed to fracking, who showed up at his events and pressed him to impose a statewide ban. Opponents were also aided by celebrities who drew attention to their cause. ...
... a curious ad denying fossil fuel-driven climate change appeared on the Tinseltown marquee downtown Vancouver on a Pattison Outdoor sign.
... Friends of Science, a Calgary-based nonprofit group that disputes climate change, bought the ad.
Richard Littlemore, co-author of 'Climate Cover-up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming' and former journalist:
"There ought to be an instrument that punishes companies that profit from the imminent destruction of humankind. You would hope for some level of corporate responsibility that would have spared us from this", he said.
Littlemore said he can't understand why skeptics still want to keep the debate open on climate change.
... Jimmy Pattison (owner of the Jim Pattison Group) should be ashamed of himself...he should be accountable for what’s up on his sign."
... 9,000 delegates have spent two weeks trying to agree on that “universal climate treaty” they hope to see signed in Paris next year. In trampling over the 1,500-year-old “Nazca Lines” etched in the desert earth, the “environmentalists” can little have thought this would so enrage the Peruvians that they are now being threatened with six years in prison.
... Lima is just yet another re-enactment of the three-stage ritual that has become only too familiar over the past 20 years. ... So the dreary farce will continue until the crack of doom ...
... the federal government recently introduced legislation — dubbed the Price Transparency Act — that will force retailers to explain why Canadians sometimes pay higher prices than Americans for the same products.
... To think a government is remotely capable of collecting and properly collating this type of comparative information assumes a degree of specific knowledge that governments do not possess, as it would be impossible to track the millions of business decisions that are made on a daily basis.
... All of this ...ignores one significant reason why some prices in Canada are higher than those in the United States: government policy. ... For example ... Ontario’s rising electricity costs ... federal “supply management” policies ... airline fares - federal government policy that prevents full cabotage ...Several others have also written about James Moore’s proposed law:
Andrew Coyne: The whole ‘Canada-U.S. price gap’ issue is a con surrounded by hypocrisy
John Ivison: Moore trades tariff relief for discredited 1970s policies
Peter Foster: Regulations R Us
... [The Senate report] is "as good as any expression of pathological sanctimoniousness that has characterized every attitude towards every effort America has taken to defend itself.
... [It is] rooted to the hostility of the idea that America is anything but a flawed, deeply immoral nation. You cannot go on the campuses of the United States without hearing this as the general opinion." ...
Sorry this column is late. I got raped again on the way home. Twice. I should clarify -- by "raped," I mean that two seductive Barry White songs came on the radio, which, according to the University of Virginia, constitutes rape.
...TAKE BACK THE NIGHT!
... Rolling Stone's fantasist rape victim told The Washington Post she didn't report her rape or go to the hospital because "she was new to campus and unaware of the resources available to her."
... The main threat to college students' physical and emotional safety these days comes not from athletes or fraternity members, but from the feminists. ...
The report by Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee regarding CIA interrogation essentially accuses the agency under George W. Bush of war criminality.Then there's the media:
...It’s a common theme (often echoed by President Obama): Amid panic and disorientation, we lost our moral compass and made awful judgments. ...
... It’s a kind of temporary-insanity defense for the Bush administration. And it is not just unctuous condescension but hypocritical nonsense.
... To make that case, to produce a prosecutorial brief so entirely and relentlessly one-sided, the committee report (written solely by Democrats) excluded any testimony from the people involved and variously accused. None. No interviews, no hearings, no statements. ...
Part I: Is It Safe To Send Your Kids To SFU?Outstanding work, absolutely outstanding.
Part II: David Suzuki, Extremists And The RCMP
Part III - coming soon.
“... we lose control. At the end of this year, the Republicans take control. And there’s some evidence that this report would never see the light of day,” she continued. “We believe it should see the light of day."
Saskatchewan Chief Perry Bellegarde has won the leadership of the Assembly of First Nations after just one ballot. Of the 464 ballots cast among chiefs, he easily exceeded the more than 60 per cent needed to win ...And nothing will change:
... the AFN, despite its name and high profile, doesn’t represent the natives of Canada. It represents the chiefs. There are more than 630 of them, and they are no more capable of reaching a workable consensus on contentious issues than are the premiers of Canada’s provinces, which number only 10.
“I know many wonderful and amazing remarkable Muslim people, Canadians and otherwise,” said Liberal committee member Sen. Grant Mitchell. “When you say that mosques are the incubators of Islamism, surely you’re not saying that they all are?”[via]
Mansur didn’t back down. ...
... Based on a 2007 book The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies by Professor Scott Page ... the idea that diversity trumps ability has become widely accepted. It is often given as a justification for continuing and even expanding “diversity” programs.
... With a chorus of believers singing this tune, it too attained the status of conventional wisdom. Hardly anyone bothered to question it – until now. ...
... Mathematics professor Abigail Thompson ... tears Page’s work apart. She says that Page’s analysis is an example of the misuse of mathematics in the social sciences. It is something that merely gave “a scientific veneer to the diversity field,” she writes.
... Another mathematics professor ... Aaron Robertson of Colgate University ... derided the findings of Page and Hong as “vacuous or at best highly trivial statements.”...
... Writing in the Nov. 28 edition of Meshwar, a free newspaper circulated in southwest Ontario, editor Nazih Khatatba approved the Nov. 18 Har Nof massacre as a “courageous and qualitative” operation.Another Muslim scumbag!
The attack “ushers a new phase which should properly be called the phase of the new Fedayeen, fighters who sacrifice their life in battle,” wrote Khatatba, who is also a board member of Palestine House in Mississauga. ...
It sounds so simple. “We” need a fiscal system that produces more of what we want – good, clean jobs — and less of what we don’t want, which is “pollution.” Let’s call it an “ecofiscal” approach.See also, Terence Corcoran: Why the call for bigger and better carbon taxes is about to escalate
... we need a carbon tax. But since taxes have such a bad name, why not change the name to a carbon “levy”?
... Mr. Manning, who heads the Manning Centre for Building Democracy, is also an advisor to the new, self-appointed Canadian Ecofiscal Commission, which aspires – like a cloister full of medieval scholastics – to set a “just price” for industrial emissions and thus fine tune a woefully inadequate market(ish) economy.
... A decade of bad policy, including Canada’s disastrous National Energy Program, followed the first OPEC crisis. The challenge in 2014 is to avoid making a new series of policy disasters.
