Trump isn't the problem, he's just a symptom

Rex Murphy - Don’t blame Trump … blame America:

... he is an illustration of a problem and not its cause. Trump is not the swamp: he is the creature emerging from it. For however ridiculous and appalling his candidacy may be, it is no worse and no more ridiculous and appalling than the whole pattern of American politics at this time.

... Is his candidacy more lunatic than the idea of a third President Bush or a second President Clinton?

... Is he more manipulative than President “you can keep you doctor, you can keep you plan” Obama? Is he less venal or arrogant than Hillary  ...?

... Is he less repellent than false and theatrical rape hoaxes that have beleaguered American campuses from Duke to Columbia?

... Is anything Trump has said more staggering or depressing than the idea that in egalitarian America, a couple of small-time business owners can get fined $135,000 for not baking a cake? ...

... it is not Trump who should bear the responsibility for his success. It is the practice of politics itself and the political class (which includes, more and more, the news media) that has for so long abandoned honest representation of ideas, facing difficult issues with real language, which has so professionalized campaigns and elections that the sound of a human voice saying something it actually means is so rare.

...

Are Canadian politics any less dysfunctional than America's?  Would Trump be any worse for America than Trudeau or Mulcair for Canada? 

Canada declared "most reputable country in 2015"

Canada regains title as most reputable nation in the world despite Harper derangement frenzy

Canada under Stephen Harper’s Conservative government has just regained its title as the most reputable nation in the world.  

According to the Reputation Institute’s annual report, Canada remains at the top of a 55-nation list for perceived trust, admiration and respect, based on a survey of 48,000 people around the world.

... few media picked it up. Instead, the Canadian media complex is in the grip of Harper Derangement Frenzy (HDF), which is an upgrade to hurricane status from Harper Derangement Syndrome ...

... [Canada's] international standing has never been stronger. Even the government’s global carbon strategy, portrayed by many as a national embarrassment, looks good to many other nations. As the table below suggests, Canada remains at the top of the world.

Good show Canada! (Well, at least progressives will think so.)

See also, Forbes.

Note: In 2014 Canada ranked second after Switzerland, and first for three years running in 2013,  2012 and 2011.

Eco-extortionists meet strong resistance from one of their victims

Peter Foster: At last, a Canadian corporate hero

 Two weeks ago, Todd Paglia, executive director of U.S.-based radical environmental organization ForestEthics, sent a letter of warning to Richard Garneau, CEO of Montreal-based Resolute Forest Products.

In his reply Mr. Garneau told Paglia and his ENGO, ForestEthics [quite a name for an extortionist!], to shove off, saying among many other things:

"... The fact is, Mr. Paglia, we both know that ForestEthics has been campaigning against Resolute for years – even while you have pretended to be an abiding member of the CBFA. Your most recent letter, which follows your letter of December 5, 2014, with its inaccurate allegations and threats and intimidation, is not new; it is merely a continuation of the bully tactics you have used with us from the start. ...

... I am struggling to understand precisely what kind of protection you believe the CBFA has granted us under these circumstances. ForestEthics has been in violation of both the spirit and letter of the CBFA for years. Perhaps I should have called you out sooner ..."

Rare courage:

... Rarely if ever has a corporate executive dared to call an ENGO shakedown what it is. Richard Garneau is thus almost unique among executives. In a corporate world dripping with bogus “business ethics,” Garneau, a quiet and modest man who lives the Boreal, has demonstrated some true moral backbone, refusing to bow to what he sees as lies and intimidation.

Media complicity or cowardice or both?

You’d think that the Canadian media – given to celebration of local exceptionality in any way, shape or form – would be keen to report on Garneau. But he is exceptional in an area where the media almost never dares to tread, either because it is part of the radical environmental crusade itself, or because it too is scared.

All posts on Resolute Forest Products' battles with the radical ENGOs.

Sadistic feminist bullies use courts to criminally harass critic

Political activists Steph Guthrie and Heather Reilly, with the cooperation of the "justice" system, are  putting Gregory Allan Elliott (and family) through legal, financial and emotional hell.

Christie Blatchford has been covering Elliott's trial.

The verdict is due on October 6, 2015 and has huge implications for Elliott's personal freedom and for free speech in general. Any "criminality" here is that of the complainants and the legal system for participating in prosecuting this clearly bogus case.

#IStandWithGregoryElliott

Jane Fonda - mega-wealthy hypocrite

Jane Fonda's net worth, US $120 million - and a giant carbon footprint:



Same old, same old.  Pushing 78 years old and still trashing the West and boosting its enemies.  She'll be doing it till she dies, and continuing from Hell.

Big Wind's environmental wreckage

Tom Harris - An ill-wind in Ontario

Environmentalists often talk about people whose lives are ruined by man-made global warming.
But they never mention the lives that are devastated by misguided climate change policy. ...

Notley gives Quebec a veto over Alberta's future

Ezra Levant:



Notley and her extremist crew seem to, in very short order, be confirming what should be Albertans' worst fears about an NDP government.

The good better news, Albertans are noticing.  According to a recent Mainstreet/Postmedia poll:

"... if an election were held immediately, more voters would cast votes for the Wildrose Party than the governing NDP." 

 But still, four years of majority NDP government will be plenty to inflict massive damage.

Update: Brad Wall's reaction, following which Ezra asks and answers:

"Ten years ago would you have ever thought that Canada's best premier, best economy and clearest advocate for free enterprise would be from Saskatchewan, and that the most anti-oil socialist premier would be from Alberta??

"Yeah! Me neither."

Iranian nuke deal: Obama's Chamberlain moment?

Not quite says Mark Steyn: the comparison "... is rather unfair to Neville Chamberlain"



See also: Barack Obama,  Mark Levin,   Dick Cheney,   George Jonas,   Jonathan Kay,   Bibi Netanyahu, and Ezra Levant

Study: Don't be judgemental towards self-identifying vampires

Rachel Dolezal, a purely white woman, self identifies as a black woman.  What's next?

How about self-identifying as a vampire:

Research led by D.J. Williams, director of social work at Idaho State University, indicated that people who identify themselves as “real” vampires ... would not disclose their practices to those in the helping professions and risk reactions like ridicule, disgust and possible diagnosis of a mental illness.  [Yah think?!]

The paper, published in the latest issue of Critical Social Work, a peer-reviewed journal based in Canada, found that authentic vampires ...  might be stereotyped by clinicians whose fields discourage biases ... [concluding]:

... social workers and helping professionals should learn more about alternative identities and communities, listen and learn from clients, strive to become more aware of our own potential biases and stereotypes, and interrogate and challenge common social discourses that pathologize and demonize.

... Clinicians should continually work to infuse core professional values and ethical standards and principles, including social justice, dignity, and worth of the person, the importance of human relationships, competence, social diversity, and client self-determination [hitting nearly every po-mo, pc buzzword in the social "science" lexicon].

It may be politically incorrect, but I think I'll file this under "batshit crazy".

Greek deal struck? The saga continues ...

Peter Foster: The Agreekment paradox:

They’re going to do what? ...  Is this script being written by Lewis Carroll or Samuel Beckett? ... after a 17-hour negotiating session ... there was an “Agreekment,” part of which is another Euros 86 billion of debt.

... has to be voted on both by the Greek Parliament on Wednesday (that won’t go well) and various European parliaments. ...  the Germans are victims here too. They will have to take the biggest brush cut when the debt clippers come out again.

... This mess starts and ends with belief that you can socialize away economic problems. Unfortunately that is the foundation on which the European Union’s “social democracy” is built.  It was never sustainable, and Monday’s bizarre start of yet another round of negotiations indicates that it is unravelling fast. 

See also:

Here’s what could still go wrong

Greece’s economic lessons for us

Time for science to recover its integrity and "climb off the hockey stick"

I missed this when it played last month.  Mark Steyn's hilariously dead serious keynote speech to the International Conference on Climate Change in Washington, DC:



[via]

More unbridled, careless rhetoric from Pope Francis

Quick, someone get a bridle on this pope, and pull back hard on the bit!

Once again Pope Francis feeds anti-capitalist ammo to his leftist enemies, who, lately, have been hanging on every word that can possibly be quoted or misquoted as "anti-capitalism" and/or anti-Western.  Nearly every Bing hit for this story has him saying "capitalism is the dung of the devil".

The Daily Caller, one of very few exceptions, quotes the pope precisely and concludes:

"No, Pope Francis Didn’t Call Capitalism ‘The Dung Of The Devil’"

The Pope has been attacking "unbridled capitalism", "greed" and "climate change" as the source of all evil in the modern world.  This is both ignorant and weird because:

(1) the first world, where poverty is least prevalent and justice, democracy and freedom most prevalent got that way in no small measure thanks to free market capitalism.  Furthermore, nowhere in the first world is capitalism "unbridled".  It is very bridled, and in most cases too bridled.

(2) all the third world hell-holes on the planet (many of them very Catholic, by the way) are suffering from grinding poverty, injustice and lack of freedom because they are subject to unbridled totalitarianism, unbridled socialism and/or unbridled dictatorship. Why doesn't Pope Francis speak up against these evils? If he had half a clue, he would.

Get a grip, Francis! Those leftists who love to quote your careless rhetoric are not your friends.  In fact most are at best indifferent (many are hostile) to religion and not a few despise the Catholic Church in particular. And, encouraging them like this will lead to more poverty and suffering in the world, not less.

Update: I particularly liked this comment in the NP article, from EarlP

... His failure to understand the good that has been done in the world by capitalists and capitalism, actually leaves him in the position of becoming a useful id#ot (as Lenin might have said) for those opposed to the promotion and expansion of liberty and democracy.

We need a little more John Paul II, and a lot less Hugo Chavez from this Pope.

What should Greece do?

Lawrence Solomon's advice (or is it just a prediction?):

... Let’s first stipulate that Greek governments are 100 per cent responsible for borrowing money they knew they had no hope of repaying, and that they should be deemed fully culpable for their actions. Let’s also stipulate that the foreign banks and their EU enablers are 100 per cent responsible for making irresponsible loans that they knew couldn’t be repaid, and that they too should be deemed fully culpable for their misconduct.

... It has only one sensible choice — to tear up most or all of its debts and start fresh. This course, if navigated by even a half-competent government, could quickly pull Greece out of its seven-year-long depression and lead the country into prosperity....

 Let's see what they do.

Notley speaks from other side of mouth mumbles reassuring double-speak to oil industry forum

Ezra Levant parses her words and compares them with her actions:



Here are the Calgary Herald article and Notley's speech.

Update: Peter Foster - Not Rachel Thatcher.

Pope Francis being misled on climate says former UN IPCC expert

Indur M. Goklany writes:

... [In] Pope Francis’ recent encyclical on the environment ... the Vatican has been laid (sic) astray by its advisors’ statement entitled, Climate Change and the Common Good: A Statement of the Problem and the Demand for Transformative Solutions. It makes claims that contradict empirical facts, and are ethically dubious. 

... The advisors’ “transformative solutions’’ ... would slow the ongoing broad advance in human wellbeing, retard poverty reduction, and reduce the ability to adapt and cope with adversity in general and climate change in particular, especially harming the poor.

... it is a strange ethical calculus that justifies reducing existing gains in human well-being, increasing the cost of humanity’s basic necessities, increasing poverty ... The Vatican’s advisors’moral compasses are apparently broken.

 Mr. Goklany's excellent assessment echos Peter Foster's (and others') here and here.


 

The politically correct culture of fear

Gavin McInnes:

BC Transit referendum - a big fat NO! to a new tax

Jordon Bateman, head of the BC office of the Canadian Taxpayers' Federation and leader of the NO! campaign explains the huge victory to Ezra:



The referendum was non-binding but you can bet, given the 62/38 result, that politicians will feel bound by it anyway. 

Bill 377 - union bosses' loss a victory for transparency

Brian Lilley:


Congratulations to my soon to be retired MP, Russ Hiebert, for his success in getting this private members' bill passed into law.  It will look good on his resume.

And shame on Justin Trudeau and Tom Mulcair for opposing such common sense legislation.  They wouldn't be taking union money, would they?

How "Dominion Day" was dumped by the Liberals ... and a salute to the Conservatives

From a previous post:
Some history on how "Dominion Day" was dumped in favour of the meaningless "Canada Day":

... In hindsight, it was a case of identity theft, an act of historical vandalism. A quarter-century ago, 13 members of Parliament hastily -- some say indecently -- renamed the country's national birthday in a swift bit of legislative sleight-of-hand.

At 4 o'clock on Friday, July 9, 1982, the House of Commons was almost empty. The 13 parliamentarians taking up space in the 282-seat chamber ... The whole process took five minutes. ... a private member's bill from Hal Herbert, the Liberal MP from Vaudreuil ...

And here are Mark Steyn's 2015 reflections on the subject:

... let me salute Canada's Conservative government for taking a tonally mature and historically honest approach to this country's nationhood. 

... the usual [Liberal] guff about "what a young nation we are".  We're not. We're one of the oldest continuous constitutional orders on earth, and there was always something queasily totalitarian about Liberal propagandists' insistence that Canada didn't exist until M Trudeau moved into Sussex Drive.

... Mr Harper does not share that view. ... Canada's citizenship ministry even hands out copies of Magna Carta to new arrivals - which in this 800th anniversary year is even more heartening. So I'm glad we're reconnecting with the half-a-millennium of history the Trudeaupians tried to bury.

... I shall always be grateful to Mr Harper's ministry for giving us a decade-long respite from all that Trudeaupian eternal-youth gibberish.