... Obama, ... it’s becoming increasingly clear that he hasn’t actually thought about anything much in recent years except becoming president.... But if you ask him about anything else, when he’s not doing one of his pathetic, scripted, great gaseous uplift of change you can believe in speeches, if you ask him a question off the cuff, that he’s not scripted on, he’s pathetic. He’s truly pathetic. ...listening to [unilingual] Obama talk about unilingual Americans being an embarrassment, I began to get a distinct Kerryesque whiff, the whiff of the Boston Brahmin hung over the Kenyan-Indonesian-Hawaiian, or whatever he is.
... when you look at the flip-flopping and the changing of courses, and all the rest of it, what you see is a man who throughout his career has taken the path of least resistance. ... he’s never actually dared to take any position that would cause him any problems with the people he spent courting. That’s not the kind of guy...you want...sitting in the Oval Office.
He’s a very self-absorbed guy, and I don’t think he actually thinks about the wider world, except in terms of his place in it, like this extraordinary demand that the Germans found so offensive, that this man, who just happens to be a candidate, he’s not a head of state yet, or anything, demanding to be allowed to give a speech at the Brandenburg Gate... His self-absorption and narcissism is incredible.
... it’s a centralized federation being built from the elite bureaucracy down to the people. And every time they let the people vote on it, the French and the Dutch, and now the Irish a couple of weeks ago, they vote against it, because they rightly see it as a racket. The first words of the U.S. Constitution are We, The People. The first words of the proposed European Constitution are We, the people who know better than you, the little people.
... a classic sort of royalist attitude ... a few ... Euro big shots can sit down and tell an entire continent of serfs what it is that’s going to happen.
U.S. Constitution, ... in New Hampshire, they carry it around in their pockets so they can berate their Senators and Congressmen for not sticking to it. You can buy it for $3 bucks, and it fits in your pocket. If you try to put the European Constitution in your pocket, you will be walking with a crippling limp after about six minutes. ... it’s like this huge, great, bureaucratic monstrosity.... it’s doomed.
"... the use of information and communication technologies to bully, embarrass, threaten or harass another. It also includes the use of these technologies to engage in conduct or behaviour that is derogatory, defamatory, degrading, illegal or abusive."It seems to me that threats, harassment, defamation and "illegal" behaviour are already illegal. The rest just represents more namby-pamby hyper-sensitivity from the same bunch who think dodge-ball too violent and call in the trauma counsellors whenever someone’s dog dies.
Talk about unbridled assumptions and stereotypes! Kay comes off sounding like Naomi Klein, Maude Barlow and/or David Suzuki."unbridled materialism"
"...auto-dependant, air-conditioned, eight-lane suburban lifestyle made possible by cheap oil has created a nightmare not only for our environment..."
"Modern suburban developments have no sidewalks ...
too busy navigating that other creature of cheap oil: the local megamall ...""...red-meat conservatives cruising around with right-wing bumper stickers affixed to the back of their eight-cylinder pick-up trucks..."
Peter Foster picks up on this in his column about Hollywood’s most recent spate of movies featuring unbridled anti-corporatism, concluding with:What "unbridled materialism"? Would that be Jonathan Kay’s or everyone else’s?
What "nightmare ... for our environment"? More likely a "nightmare" for our economy.
There are "no sidewalks"? Almost every new suburban development I’m familiar with, including my own, has sidewalks.
"red-meat conservatives ... eight cylinder pick-up trucks"? Where I come from there are more eight cylinder pick-up truck drivers voting NDP than for any other party.
One is ... presumably not meant to take any of these entertainments too seriously. Still, with the editorial pages of both the Post and the Globe yesterday featuring condemnations of "unfettered capitalism," "unbridled materialism" and "neo-liberal fundamentalism" perhaps nobody should take casual but persistent condemnation of the market’s most prominent actors too lightly.
If the world is facing a clear and present danger, it is that eco-hysteria and anti-corporate sentiment will lead the political class to impose the kind of draconian, wealth-destroying policies that they hypocritically preach but know will be destructive.
[via]Introduction
What is the contribution of anthropogenic carbon dioxide to global warming? This question has been the subject of many heated arguments, and a great deal of hysteria. In this article, we will consider a simple estimate based on well-accepted facts, that shows that the expected global temperature increase caused by doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide levels is bounded by an upper limit of 1.76±0.27 degrees Celsius. This result contrasts with the results of the IPCC's climate models, whose projections are shown to be unrealistically high.[...]
[...]
Conclusion
Although carbon dioxide is capable of raising the Earth's overall temperature, the IPCC's predictions of catastrophic temperature increases produced by carbon dioxide have been challenged by many scientists. In particular, the importance of water vapor is frequently overlooked by environmental activists and by the media. The above discussion shows that the large temperature increases predicted by many computer models are unphysical and inconsistent with results obtained by basic measurements. Skepticism is warranted when considering computer-generated projections of global warming that cannot even predict existing observations.
