Coming soon to a grade school near you

'The Three Little Pigs Revisited' complete with vegetarian wolf, CPR trained pigs, housing shortages and houses built from adobe and recycled paper and aluminum.

The Brothers Grimm James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps must be rolling over in their his graves.

"Liberal Weeniepants-speak"

Mark Steyn critiques Justin Trudeau's fatuous pc nit-picking of the new immigration study guide.  Justin (aka "Sh&t for Brains") thinks the word "barbaric" is too harsh, that "absolutely unacceptable" would suffice.  However, as Mark explains:

The trouble is, as your average honor killer or clitoridectomist around the planet well understands, “absolutely unacceptable” is Liberal Weeniepants-speak for “we entirely accept it”.

M. Trudeau also said "... in an official Government of Canada publication, there needs to be a little bit of an attempt at responsible neutrality...." That explicitly jibes with Steyn's take - it's Lib-speak for "it's absolutely unacceptable but we don't intend to actually do anything about it".

"Japan is not Haiti - nor New Orleans"

From Mark Steyn's mailbox:

Japan is not Haiti, and how do I know? Well, I was living just outside of Kobe when the monstrous jishin (earthquake) hit in January 1995 and virtually destroyed the center of a major Japanese city, killing 6,600 people covering a 20-mile swath. I was right in the middle. Down the street from where I lived, a seven-story apartment building ended up being four stories. My next door neighbor died from a collapsed roof. When the quake hit, I thought it was a bomb going off.

Here's what didn't happen:

~There was no looting or breaking into food stores.
~There was no time for trying to blame anyone.
~There was no one cutting in the front of the line to get water.
~There were no calls to lawyers.

Here is what did happen:

~The people in the Kobe area were not waiting around for a US aircraft carrier.
~The military was deployed immediately to dig and search.
~The Yakuza (Japanese mafia) were the early suppliers of medical supplies and food (they had the connections and the means to get the materials to the folks).
~Within days, temporary housing was being constructed all over the area.
~Within days, portable showers and toilet facilities were set up all over the area.
~Within days, supermarkets were opened, and the queues stretched endlessly as they could only let a few people in the stores at a time. There was no anger, yelling, blaming, looting, or cutting-in-front.
~Within hours, clean-up began by everyone— students, teachers, seniors, Yakuza, politicians. Everyone seemed to be contributing in some way.

So like I said, Japan is not Haiti— nor New Orleans. They don't need us…That is not to say they would not be unappreciative of any assistance, but probably the best thing we can do is provide portable medical facilities, staffing (if requested), and search-sniffing dogs.  

As a foreigner, I was treated like everyone else, and by the time I left Japan four years later, I would say 90% of the entire city of Kobe had been rebuilt (and consider that New York has been unable to erect a couple of building at Ground Zero now for going on 10 years).

A bulwark against authoritarianism

Agay libertarian's excellent defence of free speech:


Jonathan Rauch - FIRE's CFN 2010 from FIRE on Vimeo.

[via]

Political correctness - a blight on liberty

Here's Dr. Srdja Trifkovic comparing Western postmodern politically correct society with the post-Stalin Soviet bloc and Yugo under Tito.  It doesn't compare well:





[Shamelessly ripped off from Xanthippa]

What makes regulators tick?

Peter Foster takes a look at the regulator mentality:

Psychologist Abraham Maslow is famous for formulating a personal “hierarchy of needs” that stretches from breathing and eating at one end to conspicuous commitments to Save Africa at the other. He is also credited with the insight that if you are a hammer, the world looks like a nail. Regulators are perhaps more like another implement: a shovel. When they find themselves in a hole, they are inclined to keep digging (intriguingly, just like proponents of using aid to save Africa).

A recent paper by the University of Kiev’s Slavisa Tasic, Are Regulators Rational?, analyzes this mental peculiarity of regulators via the burgeoning field of cognitive science. He suggests that if regulators appear congenitally incapable of grasping that regulation creates more problems than it solves, it’s because they are congenitally incapable.

... we — and they — are (among many other cognitive shortcomings) as dumb as doorknobs when it comes to comprehending how economies work. Worse, regulators, by definition, have no idea how dumb they are. They suffer from “illusions of competence.”

... Their fundamental problem is not that they are trying to use a shovel to craft a chronometer. What they are attempting is even more impossible. The economy isn’t a machine built by humans, even though it builds lots of machines. It is an organic “natural order” that we mess with at our peril. In fact, Mr. Tasic’s paper barely skims the surface of that vast ocean of what Friedrich Hayek called the “fatal conceit” of interventionists.

... Regulators may look to cognitive science to make “smarter regulation,” but don’t expect them to express too much interest in being told they are on a fool’s errand. They aren’t fools. They’re shovels.

Alongside Peter's excellent column is a fascinating tale of escape from Canuckistan's hyper-regulated dairy industry:

... Money and freedom were the reasons for our decision. We moved our dairy cattle and machinery south of the border, but sold all Canadian immovable assets. The land, quota and farm buildings came to $45,000 per cow, while 20 miles away we purchased a more modern state-of-the-art operation for $5,200 a cow.

... If one simply Googles Census Canada and the Canadian Dairy Commission they will find that Canada’s population has more than doubled since supply management started in 1967 and that — shockingly — the Canadian actual total milk production per year has not changed, other than slightly dipping, over those four and a half ­decades.

... Diversity, because of freedom, is prevalent in New York’s Franklin county’s dairy sector. Farmers range from a 2,100-cow producer to the Old Order Amish man who milks 17 and is raising nine children. Or the legal, small raw-milk producer and retailer making incredible profits, who would be arrested if living two miles to the north.

Knowing your farming operation is in a nation where, unlike Ontario, some semblance of property rights is installed in law, gives one the freedom to invest for the future. ...

Honesty from an AGW true-believer

Dr. Richard A. Muller of UC Berkeley presents his assessment of the global warming situation, including comments on Al Gore, James Hansen and Climategate ("hide the decline" @ around the 30 minute mark).  A very interesting and  refreshingly honest presentation:



Dr. Muller also mentions his project to develop a new surface temperature data-base.  See WUWT here,  here and here.