Smack-down!

Peter Foster executes a masterful smack-down of Post columnist Dan Gardner who recently penned this loopy column accusing the Harper government of being "communists" because they reject the GHG emissions cap-and-trade approach:

... claims Mr. Gardner, their proposals to deal with the problem by regulation represent a level of economic ignorance unseen outside the University of Havana!

... Mr. Gardner claims that “pricing” carbon via cap-and-trade is “efficient because it isn’t some bureaucrat in Ottawa who decides who will reduce emissions and how they will do it.”

Has he been vacationing off the planet?

... I had never come across anybody before Mr. Gardner who dared to suggest that it was a “free market” solution. In fact, cap and trade is to free markets what Sophie’s Choice was to free choice. It corresponds to the Stalinist definition of initiative: finding the best way to carry out an order.

... Cap and trade’s “market” is entirely artificial, based on government-created scarcity. It isn’t a market in freely traded goods, but in bureaucratically regulated “bads.” ... At whatever level of regulation, however, cap and trade promotes the sleaziest of mixed-economic concoctions, supported by officials who would do the capping, and the private-sector operatives who would do the trading, and/or reap the benefits of a system that is doomed to be rigged.

... Meanwhile, the main issue remains whether there is a climate crisis in the first place. Mr. Gardner devoutly believes so, but one can’t help wondering if his grasp of science is as dodgy as his grasp of ­economics.

Classic Foster.

Update: Joanne at BLY caught Gardner's Tweet which promises a reply to Foster.  Heh, can't wait.

Sensible gun control ...

... in Switzerland (unlike Canuckistan):

... voters overwhelmingly rejected proposals that would have obliged some two million gun owners in the country to keep their weapons in public arsenals rather than at home.

.... 3,000 gun clubs, which function as key social centres in hundreds of villages.

... no national firearms register in Switzerland. ... unofficial estimates suggest there are between 2 million and 3 million guns kept in Swiss households.

[via]

Why wind power sux

From the Carbon Sense Coalition submission to the Australian Senate Enquiry into Wind Farms:

Wind Power is Dilute ... require a huge land footprint.... needs a wide network of roads, transmission lines and turbines which degrades any area containing wind farms.

Wind Power is Unreliable ... also intermittent and hard to predict. ... large backup or storage systems are required. This adds to the capital and operating costs and increases the instability of the network.

Wind Power is Ugly, Noisy and Hazardous ... Wind farms are uniformly hated by neighbours and will not be willingly accepted without heavy compensation payments. Their noise, flicker, fire risk and disturbing effect on domestic and wild animals are well documented.

Wind Power is Expensive ... Its cost is far above all conventional methods of generating electricity. It requires a huge land footprint and needs a wide network of roads, transmission lines and turbines which degrades any area containing wind farms.

Furthermore:

Wind Turbines kill [huge numbers of] Bats and Birds
Big Wind is pushing a Carbon Tax
Wind Power creates Paupers not Jobs
Global Warming Justifications are Bogus

... and then some. So, by all means, force taxpayers to cough up even more subsidies for this boondoggle.

[via FOS]

Related. And.

Atlas Shrugged, the movie

Part I  Trailer



Movie website.

[h/t]

Background, cast, etc. (What, no Jon Voight?)

Apparently it's going to be a trilogy.  Looking forward to it.

Democracy

Throughout the Egyptian revolt against the Mubarak regime over the past two weeks there has been a lot of talk about the goal being "democracy".

Worth considering is Daniel Greenfield's article on "The Democracy Fallacy":

... [people] failed to understand that democracy is a tool. A means not an end. Used correctly democracy can create a republic of free men invested with rights and responsibilities. Used incorrectly democracy can lead to political bloodbaths, anarchy or a genocidal madman.

... The fundamental error ... in messianically embracing democracy as an ultimate good, is that we contrast it with tyranny as the ultimate evil. We falsely assume that tyranny is evil because it is undemocratic.

... Democracy and freedom are not the same thing.  ...

Debating the multicult

The Globe and Mail's resident nitwit, John Ibbitson, doesn't want Canadians to debate multiculturalism:

Whether we like it or not – and there’s not much to like – events could force a national debate on whether multiculturalism is working in Canada.

... The country will survive a debate over multiculturalism, even if we may not be able to prevent one.

He'll no doubt be shocked when he finds out from the nearly 1400 comments that almost everyone thinks he's a moron. As Blazing Cat Fur put it, he got "his poncy ass kicked".

Mark Steyn on Ibbitson's column.

And over at Climbing Out of the Dark, Hunter comments on the growing list of national leaders who've declared the multicult a flop/disaster.

Orwellian food fascism

The Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute (CAPI) has produced a new report. Predictably it's loaded with fashionable eco-buzzwords and bureaucratic bullcrap.  From Peter Foster's scathing critique:

... a steaming shovel-ready pile of policy titled Canada’s Agri-Food Destination, which amounts to a non-fiction rewrite of Animal Farm for the 21st century: a self-parody of bureaucratic pretension.

... The CAPI report produces grand Soviet-style targets before getting down to the nitty-gritty of planting new gobbledegook-fertilized bureaucracies as far as the eye can see.

... three pieces of numerical mysticism, two anti-economic mercantilist fallacies and subscription to an established policy disaster before we’ve even left the first page of the executive summary.

... The path to agri-nirvana requires five bureaucratic “Enablers of Change.” ...

... Here is the media’s role: “Link the important issues to prompt change ... [as for global warming, eco-brainwashing and badgering]

... It’s uncertain what the Harper government thinks of this Liberal-created bureaucratic monstrosity or its latest report.

And you can't miss Mr. Foster's exasperation with it all in his closing recommendation:

... [Federal Agriculture Minister Gerry] Ritz should take the whole organization, now ensconced in pseudo-agricultural splendor on the grounds of Ottawa’s legendary experimental farm, out to a more remote rural location with a long gun and a shovel.

Bravo, Peter!