Taliban Jack is back!

In response to news of a British commander’s assessment that the war in Afghanistan cannot be won, Jack Layton expresses his happiness:

"I'm heartened by the words of this senior military commander ..."

Good news for the Taliban is good news for Jack. That really ought to boost troop morale.

Detailed analysis at The Torch where the bottom line is:

The one thing Brigadier Carleton-Smith did not say was that the Taliban would win. But that is certainly not the impression most readers would get from those headlines, which seem to say the glass is plain empty--if not entirely broken. Most people think if you don't win, you lose. I really do think the Western media are increasingly taking sides: the wrong one. Fie on them.

The great debates - Part II

Stephen Taylor put together this excellent video from the English debate showing Harper's opponents "shadowboxing" George Bush:



Predictable -- and sad.

[via Blue Like You]

The great debates

I watched the French language leaders debate last night. It sucked! The format was awful - three opposition leaders and the Green leader beating up on Stephen Harper. And Harper, when he could get a word in (in the voice of a high pitched, lithping interpretor), came off flat.

So, tonight, having had enough Canuck-style aggravation for one week, I skipped the English language debate and watched the U.S. VP debate. It was excellent. Sarah Palin did very well - she held her own against the much more experienced Joe Biden who also did very well. Maybe the McCain ticket has been revived - once again.

Update (Oct 3): Couldn't help myself. I've now seen the playback of last night's English language debate. Luckily I could fast forward through large chunks of it. Compared to the Palin/Biden debate it came across as uncivil and juvenile - someone said it was a little like a two hour episode of Question Period only with the opposition all shouting simultaneously. I don't know how Harper mangaged to keep his cool through it all. That Jack Layton is sure an aggressive, nasty, insulting piece of work. If Harper had said some of those things there'd be no end of the MSM's piling on about what an angry, mean-spirited right-winger he was.

Enough is enough. “I’m outta here!”

Victoria has become a city (like many I’m sure) run by scolds and control freaks. Regional "Authorities" (they do seem to love ‘authority’ around here) police everything from the cleanliness of recycled cans to water restrictions (needed or not) and draconian anti-smoking bylaws.

Recently, a privately owned and operated sports and entertainment centre, encouraged by the health Nazis' attitude, decided to take things a step further and conduct searches and seizures of patrons’ tobacco products ...

Which prompted this excellent letter:

Re: Save-On centre butting out, News, Sept. 17, 2008.

Has the Capital Regional District and Save-On-Foods centre gone completely insane?

You will not be confiscating any of my tobacco products or infringing on my rights, as I never plan to return to the land of the over-regulated and bylaw-saturated non-personally responsible hell that is being created in Victoria region and Canada as a whole by silly self-serving bureaucrats trying to justify their existence by telling me how to live.

Anarchy works for me. That is why I moved to Mexico. I write you as I enjoy a beer and a smoke in a public shopping mall, just ahead of commute back home in my vehicle, while not wearing a seat belt, watching smiling families riding in the back of pick-up trucks whiz by me at 110 kilometres per hour.

Guess what will happen if I crash? They will say it was my own fault. No one to blame but myself. How liberating. Adios!

Sean Randall
Formerly of Langford

Great letter, Sean! I know exactly where you’re coming from.

Andrew Weaver - 'political' scientist

Andrew Weaver is a UVic climatologist (climate modeler) and global warming hysteric. He’s one of those 1/2500 Nobel laureates who shared the 2007 Peace Prize with Al Gore. This has made him the go-to guy for the local media whenever there’s some minor weather-related story that needs an authoritative voice to back up claims that it’s evidence of the impending doom. He’s their chief political scientist with emphasis on "political" since it pretty much dominates his "science".

The latest news is that Weaver has written a new book entitled "Keeping Our Cool". So naturally Weaver gets an interview and book review. Some interesting excerpts:

Keeping Our Cool, written during a sabbatical last winter... [Ie. on the taxpayers’ dime]

... so "incensed" is he by what he calls Prime Minister Stephen Harper's war on science and scientists, by the government's questioning of climate change ...he felt he had no choice.

... he said. "But I recognize that [climate change] is the defining problem for humanity, and I recognize there's only one leader in Canada who's actually dealing with it."

"Vote for [Liberal Party Leader] Stéphane Dion. Don't vote for the Green Party,"

He has no patience with people who persist in believing there is still scientific debate on climate change. [And Weaver insists on calling himself a 'scientist'. He should read Lawrence Solomon’s book "The Deniers"]

He writes ... "Not a single study disagreed with the consensus view concerning the role of greenhouse gases in causing global warming." [True, but that’s not what the "debate" is about, is it, Andrew?]

... he added, if scientists were to criticize the government publicly, they could lose the funding they need to do their research. [There’s a whopper! There’s hardly a government anywhere, including Canada, that hasn’t bought into global warming alarmism. Weaver has never shied away from criticizing anyone he deems insufficiently enthusiastic about his alarmist viewpoint. And I doubt that he’s ever been short of government funds to pursue his "science". In fact, the scientists who find their funding and reputations in jeopardy are those whose research might cast the slightest doubt on AGW orthodoxy.]

Weaver decided to be a whistle-blower by writing Keeping Our Cool ... so incensed by what has happened in Ottawa, by the war on science in Ottawa... 'Enough is enough.' [Oh come on, Andrew! You've been blowing that whistle so long you've worn it out!]

And the ‘piece de resistance’:

Reading in a newspaper story that environmentalist David Suzuki and his wife sometimes retire to their bedroom to cry, Weaver said he can understand why. [Ha ha haa hahaaa! More likely they’re laughing all the way to the bank.]

These aren’t the views of a scientist. They’re the views of a proselytizing political activist . His government funding should be cut.

The financial crisis and corporate greed

Most MSM reporting on the on-going monster financial crisis in the U.S. points to a consensus that it’s entirely a result of the actions of greedy, reckless corporate executives. Anchors and pundits invariably point fingers in that direction. And the left is presenting the crisis as a failure of capitalism in general - backed up Thursday, for example, by a Wall Street protest by unions objecting to the proposed $700 billion taxpayer bailout as a bailout of greedy Wall Street executives.

It’s widely accepted that it’s the government’s responsibility to devise a rescue plan (and given the size of the problem this seems true). So there have been many, many interviews with politicians who, naturally, encourage the view that someone other than government (ie. themselves) is to blame. Both Obama and McCain are pointing fingers at Wall Street greed and calling for more government regulation including, as a sop to the vengeful masses, capping executive salaries. Almost no one asks what government’s role has been in causing the crisis.

One notable exception to this trend has been the Financial Post where Terence Corcoran, Peter Foster and William Watson have been pointing out a few inconvenient truths.

For example, here’s a list of relevant questions and answers from William Watson:

* Who inflated the housing bubble with 1% money in a strong economy? (The Greenspan Fed.)
* Who encouraged all sorts of low-income, high-risk borrowers to acquire mortgages and homes they were doomed to lose? (Government agencies of all stripes.)
* Who created the stock-option mania in big investment companies by capping tax deductions for executive salaries? (Congress, in the early 1990s.)
* Who prolonged the current crisis with continuing destructive ambiguity, still unresolved, about which institutions would be bailed out and which wouldn't be? (Today's regulators and policy-makers.)

Here’s Peter Foster on the calls for more government regulation:

There is almost universal "consensus" (a shudder-worthy concept) that the recent turmoil in U.S. financial markets must be due to insufficient regulation, or at least regulation of the "wrong" kind. So now we must have more and better regulation.
[...]
It seems beyond the conceptual abilities of most people that current problems might have been based on too much rather than too little regulation.
[...]
They have a blind spot to the role of government programs and policies in promoting the housing bubble, and of facilitating institutions, especially Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, that were widely perceived as being government backed (and ultimately were).
[...]
Wall Street’s recent difficulties have inevitably brought the usual anti-capitalist suspects from their lairs to claim Cassandra status, while in fact merely displaying their deeply embedded prejudices and historical amnesia. Take the CBC. .... Its doleful Washington correspondent, Michael Colton, declared that recent events were an embarrassment for "free enterprise." He then channeled a puzzled public’s lament: "Why can’t American business stand on its own feet?" One might well ask the same question of the CBC.

And here and here Mr. Foster points to lessons from the Great Depression:

...what made the Great Depression great was not its depth but its length, and what made it so long was lousy legislation based on misunderstandings of markets and demonization of capitalists. Similar legislation is now being proposed again.
[...]
FDR’s attempts to "correct" markets and counter capitalist greed led to such policy fallacies as believing that more unionization would force up wages and thus kick-start the economy. These and similar interventionist measures proved disastrous and prolonged the slump.
[...]
Lord Skidelsky implies that the Great Depression was a failure of laissez-faire capitalism, but as Milton Friedman pointed out, it should be more accurately laid at the door of government monetary manipulation, while the Depression’s depth and length were due to the uncertainty created by interventionist policies.

And on interference with executive compensation:

Attempts to control salaries have had perverse impacts before. There was uproar over executive incomes during the recession of the early 1990s. This led to restrictions that resulted in the flourishing of stock options, which were poorly accounted for, and in turn were blamed for the excesses of the dot-com boom and collapse of Enron and WorldCom.

More here and here from Terence Corcoron.

And there's an instructive thread here, of all places, at Climate Audit.

And finally, Mark Steyn’s observation:

... whenever anything goes wrong in the economy, the fault is always blamed on capitalism, red in tooth and claw. And in this case, both candidates tend to blame greed, untrammeled greed. Well, greed is writ in the human heart and is embedded in our DNA, and has been since the beginning of time. So clearly, greed itself is not the factor...

Amen.

Sarah Palin’s brand of feminism

"Dissident feminist" Camille Paglia is enthusiastic:

I nearly fell out of my chair. It was like watching a boxing match: this woman turned out to be a tough, scrappy fighter with a mischievous sense of humour.
[...]
Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand-new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut at the Republican convention, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist.
[...]
In the US, the ultimate glass ceiling has been fiendishly complicated for women. Our president must also serve as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, so a woman candidate for president must show a potential capacity for military affairs and decision-making.

As a dissident feminist, I have been arguing for 20 years that young American women aspiring to political power should be studying military history rather than women’s studies with their rote agenda of never-ending grievances.

The gun-toting Palin is a brash ambassador from America’s pioneer past. She immediately reminded me of the frontier women of the western states, which first granted women the right to vote after the civil war — long before the federal amendment guaranteeing universal suffrage was passed in 1919. Frontier women faced the same harsh challenges and had to tackle the same chores as men, which is why men could regard them as equals — unlike the genteel, corseted ladies of the eastern seaboard.
[...]
... that’s the Palin brand of can-do, no-excuses, moose-hunting feminism — a world away from the whining, sniping, wearily ironic mode of establishment feminism represented by Gloria Steinem, a Hillary Clinton supporter.
[..]
Frontier women were far bolder and hardier than today’s pampered, petulant bourgeois feminists, always looking to blame their complaints about life on someone else.

[via David Thompson]