Jennifer Lynch is lying liar

Ezra Levant reviews CHRC commissar Jennifer Lynch’s recent attempts to defend her abusive commission and focuses on her disdain for truth:

We already know how little regard Jennifer Lynch has for the truth. She put it in her grostesque, unsolicited memo to Parliament last month when she suggested that truth be removed from the Criminal Code as a defence to the charge of hate propaganda.
　
In her latest letter to the National Post she proves yet again that she has no compunction about lying, lying to the public and lying to Parliament.
　
If one has no compunction about lying, surely one ought to be smart about it. That is, a successful sociopath would not tell lies that are too easily checkable. But that is precisely what Lynch did in yesterday's National Post newspaper. ... [the litany of lies follows]

And in conclusion:

Jennifer Lynch is a liar.
She lies about many things -- more all the time.
Politics tolerates a lot of lies.
But her lie denying her staff's bigoted comments on Nazi websites?
That's the lie that is going to get her fired.

What will it take for the Justice Minister to undo his mistake?

Update: Based on BCF's remark in the comments about Lynch's appointment term I did some checking. According to this document the Chief Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner are appointed for SEVEN year terms with the provisos "good behaviour" and "may be removed at any time by the GiC on address of the Senate and House of Commons".

Papal encyclical "a willful disregard for economic history"

As expected Pope Benedict has delivered an encyclical that Terence Corcoran says:

... catches the anti-capitalist waves now washing over the globe's political classes.

... sweeping 140-page collection of sound bites and instant quotations that will be used by all and sundry as another authority for condemning free markets, globalization, big business, finance, outsourcing, capitalism, copyright law, greed, climate change, energy consumption, etc.

... In Pope Paul's. encyclical [Paul VI, 1967] written when half the world was under Communist dictatorship, not a word was said of problems with Marxism. Still, Benedict explicitly aims to take up Pope Paul's tedious stereotypical message from Populorum Progressio. ... as foundation for a renewal of the old leftist attacks on business, markets and capitalism.

... 159 [footnotes], but none support the big economic analyses and factual claims that make up most of the encyclical.

... Benedict dashes off .. unsupported statements by the hundreds. ... It dismisses "so-called outsourcing"; ... On the current economic crisis - adopts the idea that Big Government is the answer. ..."The technologically advanced societies can and must lower their domestic energy consumption."; "... excessive zeal for protecting knowledge through an unduly rigid assertion of the right to intellectual property ..."

... What Benedict's encyclical betrays, most of all, is a willful disregard for economic history and the massive benefits of free markets and globalization.

... After 40 years of dramatic gains in global wealth expansion, after an explosion of living standards and productivity capability around the world, after four decades of free trade and markets that have turned much of the world into bastions of progress, along comes Benedict with a call to turn the clock back.

As Hunter said: "Dear Pope, Butt Out". Unfortunately, he didn’t.

Muzzling AGW skeptics

Al Gore’s invocation of the Nazi comparison (previous post) in describing the AGW hysterics’ struggle to save the planet is one more example of an attempt to silence dissent. As Lubos Motl said, it’s Gore and his fellow climate alarmists who are looking like Nazis.

Lorne Gunter picks up on the same theme in his column today:

If you visit drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures-- the site of a scientist who, for 30 years, has used satellites to monitor global temperature -- you will see that as of the end of June, the Earth is no warmer than it was in 1979.

.... And while there have been more warm years than cool ones in the past decade-and-a-half, the trend, since at least 2003, has been downward.

... since Al Gore released his movie An Inconvenient Truth in October 2006, the Earth's temperature has lost 0.74F, almost exactly the amount the UN's climate panel claims was gained in the entire 20th century.

... Still, if anything, the rhetoric of global warming and climate change has become even more frenzied since 2006, not less, even to the point where scientists skeptical of the warming theory are being gagged by the Obama administration and the UN.

... when evidence arose last week that the EPA had killed an internal report claiming that much had changed in the past year and that a reassessment of climate predictions was needed, ... EPA climate analyst Alan Carlin was told his conclusions would have "a very negative impact on our office."

... Similarly, UN scientists gathering in Copenhagen this week to discuss what must be done to save polar bears, have excluded Canadian researcher Mitch Taylor, perhaps the world's foremost polar bear expert, because (according to a memo to Dr. Taylor obtained by London's Daily Telegraph) of "the position you've taken on global warming." According the hosts of the conference, Dr. Taylor's views doubting man-made warming "are extremely unhelpful."

"Very negative impact", "extremely unhelpful" - for one thing to governments' ability to sell a carbon tax which Obama needs to fund his socialist universal healthcare plan.

Al Gore plays the Nazi card

Via WUWT:

Al Gore invoked the spirit of Winston Churchill yesterday when he urged political leaders to follow the example of Britain’s wartime leader in the battle against climate change.

... Speaking in Oxford ... Mr Gore said: "Winston Churchill aroused this nation in heroic fashion to save civilisation in World War Two. We have everything we need except political will ..."

Mr Gore admitted that it was difficult to persuade the public that the threat from climate change was as urgent as that from Hitler.

Sure. And in Gore’s fevered brain he’s playing Churchill. Get real Al. Dealing with a natural phenomenon is in no way equivalent to fighting a war to defeat an evil totalitarian regime bent on murder, mayhem and global domination. Suggesting such an equivalence is beyond idiotic.

Of course Gore’s analogy is based on the assumption that the climate ‘problem’ is AGW and that skeptics are the enemy. His analogy is still way over-the-top. Political and intellectual adversaries engaging in vigorous debate is how free societies are supposed to operate. Drawing an equivalence between what should be a free debate and a war to defeat Hitler is obscene.

However, for those who insist that a Nazi comparison is valid, two can play that game. Lubos Motl, for instance, agrees that the Nazi analogy is a good one. Except that it’s Gore and the AGW alarmists who are playing the Nazi role and the skeptics are playing the persecuted Jews:

... I don't think that comparisons to Nazis should be taboo. The AGW movement is becoming radical enough for thoughtful comparisons of Nazism and environmentalism to gain importance.

... Assuming that I ask you to optimize the analogy, where do we stand today? My guess is that with the AGW activists today, we are in the situation of Germany in 1936 or so. It's not yet a "crisis" but the global warming realists enjoy a comparable treatment as the Jews in 1936. The fighters against climate change are slowly (or quickly?) taking over the scientific institutions and international organizations.

... Some pogroms against power plants may resemble a modest version of the Night of Broken Glass - but we're not there yet. It is up to us whether 2011 will be similar to 1938, too.

... But structurally speaking, the current fight against global warming (i.e. alarmism) is similar to the fight against Nazism, indeed. It's not quite the same thing but the number of similarities is sufficiently high for us to learn a lesson or two.

If there’s a Nazi comparison to be drawn Lubos makes a far better one.

Bellicose proselytizing atheists - a superb put-down

Anyone who regularly patronizes bookstores can’t help noticing the number of books pushing atheism. "The God Delusion" and "Godless" by Richard Dawkins, "God is not Great: How religion poisons everything" by Christopher Hitchens, "The End of Faith", by Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett’s "Breaking the Spell", and so on ... They’ve been on the shelves for a few years now and remain prominently displayed so sales must be good.

Anyone who has read these authors couldn’t help but notice the strident, intolerant, arrogant posture the so-called New Atheists have adopted against religious belief and believers. Hitchens’s title says it all. Dawkins’ contempt is similarly blatant. And they all rely on arguments based one way or another on modern, and in quantum-physical string theory and cosmology, postmodern ‘science’.

David Berlinski, a professor of mathematics and philosophy, science writer and agnostic ("a secular Jew" whose "religious education did not take") decided, in defense of religious thought and sentiment, to take on these atheists. In his recent book, "The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions", he does so with razor sharp wit and logic. Some samples:

... When [Sam Harris] writes that he has been ‘dumbstruck’ by Christian and Moslem intellectual commitments, I believe the word has met the man.
... The sciences, many scientists argue, require no criticism because the sciences
comprise a uniquely self-critical institution ... Individual scientists may make mistakes, but like the Communist Party under Lenin, science is infallible because its judgements are collective.
... physicist Victor Stenger scoffs that it is the "last resort of the theist who seeks to argue for the existence of God from science and finds all his other arguments fail". Sheer chutzpah, if I may use the Greek for cheek. It is Stenger who is arguing against the existence of God "from science."
... Having begun with Stenger, I might as well finish him off.... he has completely misunderstood the terms of the problem ... A man must really know his limits, as Clint Eastwood observed.
No less than the doctrines of religious belief, the doctrines of quantum cosmology are what they seem: biased, partial, inconclusive, and largely in the service of passionate but unexamined conviction.
To an editorial in ‘Nature’ that claims: "The idea that human minds are the product of evolution is ‘unassailable fact’ ... With all deference to the sensibilities of religious people, the idea that man was created in the image of God can surely be put aside." [Berlinski replies:] Those not willing to put such sentiments aside, the scientific community has concluded, are afflicted by a form of intellectual ingratitude. – It is remarkable how widespread ingratitude really is.
I would find Hitchens’s thoughts even more gratifying than I do had he not enlarged them to encompass nonlinear dynamics and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, subjects that in his ineptitude he waves like a majestic frond.
On Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg’s nihilism: "The more comprehensible the universe becomes ... the more it also seems pointless." He has a point. The arena of the elementary particles – his arena – is a rather depressing place ... What is it’s point?

Berlinski doesn’t argue in favour of any particular religious beliefs but instead shows how the bellicose proselytizing atheists’ arguments from science are full of logical holes.

"The Devil’s Delusion" is a real gem. Berlinski is a credit to agnostics; the religious will thank him; atheists will hate him. It’s win, win, win.

Aboriginals’ plight - root causes

The plight of the aboriginal people has been a perennial hot topic for decades. Today, nearly everyone agrees the Indians’ situation is pretty awful though nothing ever seems to improve. A recent book, "Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry. The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation", by Frances Widdowson and Albert Howard provides a no-nonsense examination of the root causes of the problem. Peter Foster reviews it and likes much of what he reads:

... The "industry" in question consists of a large and ever-growing group of lawyers, bureaucrats, consultants and academics whose careers depend on the "Great Game" of land claims and self-government, which are sold as the cure for aboriginal poverty and dependency.

...The book slaughters a herd of sacred cows, including the validity of "traditional knowledge" and native "justice," and the notion that aboriginals have some special "spiritual" ecological sensitivity.

Claims to sovereignty are bogus because pre-contact aboriginals had no written laws or specialized governments. The suggestion that the U. S. Constitution was inspired by the Iroquois Confederacy is a crock. Chief Seattle's noble words were entirely manufactured. "Culturally appropriate" native medicine is dangerous quackery. "Holism" equals charlatanism. Ethnobotany is BS. The wisdom of elders is primitive ignorance. "Preserving" primitive languages means restricting the ability to think.

... The book derides postmodernism, cultural relativism and Orwellian "Pomospeak," noting that aboriginal policy is marked by obfuscation and denial.

... The book -- which I literally could not put down -- contains an excellent historical background to current policy, good accounts of the origins of such notions as the "Noble Savage" and an explanation of how anthropology came to be corrupted by activism.

Sounds like great stuff. Unfortunately, however, the book is badly marred by the authors’ goofy Marxist analysis and prescriptions and it’s enough to make Peter Foster puke:

... a bunch of ill-fitting Marxism, and references to the theories of Trotsky!

... their own "solution" is, if anything, as misguided as, and even more dangerous than, that of the aboriginal industry, since it recommends "socializing ownership so that goods and services are produced not to obtain profits but to satisfy human need." All to the tune of "Imagine." I'm not making this up.

... This otherwise excellent book concludes in a flurry of anticapitalist and even anti-Zionist (!) rhetoric. Example: "While grain is stockpiled in industrial countries people in the Third World starve." Huh? The world's problems are allegedly due to "the conflict that exists between the few who own the means of production and those who are the producers of all value." Where are we? Manchester circa 1845?
Still, it is apparently "by eliminating this fundamental 'difference' that we can become a global tribe and the 'world can live as one.' " Pass the culturally appropriate emetic: I want to throw up!

... "Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry" makes a powerful case that the aboriginal culture must die so that aboriginal people may live. Then ruins it by throwing in The Communist Manifesto.

Oh well, maybe the Marxist drivel will at least help to get leftists to buy into the authors’ more realistic assessment of the Indian industry’s role in perpetuating the misery.

A few months ago the National Post ran excerpts of the book here, here and here and a favourable review by Jonathan Kay here.

Happy Dominion Day!

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Update: David Warren expresses some thoughts on "Canada Day" that capture quite well how I feel.

David's example of our politicians and media "updating" the motto making it "From sea to sea to sea" is one I find particularly annoying. Not only is it tampering with our heritage (again!), presumably to be more inclusive, it's ridiculous to assume that the original "From sea to sea" excludes our northern boundaries any more than it excludes the southern one. I wonder when they'll begin pushing yet another "update" to make it "From sea to sea to sea to the USA" just to be sure no one feels left out!

[via Dr. Roy]