Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Peter Foster's year in review

"Let’s start this brief review of 2014 on the positive side, with a quote from the new head of TD Bank, Bahrat Masrani, about the wonderful diversity of Canadian business. Comparing himself with his predecessor, Ed Clark, Mr. Masrani noted: “I was brought up a Hindu, Ed was brought up a hippie.”" ...
... One prediction for next year: The great climate policy meeting in Paris will come to an agreement. To keep talking.

Monday, December 29, 2014

The year in Liberal Stupid

James Delingpole and Milo Yiannopoulos - Part I:
JAMES: “Rape Culture"  ... If you want to know what “Rape Culture” really looks like, just pay a visit to Islamic-State-held territory in Iraq and Syria.
... Now compare and contrast with the confected, faux grievances of the West’s oppressed female Social Justice Warriors, as they battle against such appalling injustices as: their insufficient representation on bank notes ... not having been given as many Nobel-prizes as men have ...

MILO: "GameGate"  ... Gamers are the only fandom ever to mount a sustained revolt against social justice warriors riding in to “save” their hobby from “misogyny” and other invented offences.

... GamerGate, indirectly, had a huge effect on feminism in the popular imagination this year, because it showed third-wave feminism up for what it is: a hateful, bullying, authoritarian creed of funless cultural Marxism. ...
JAMES: “Torture” ... can you not see something effete, decadent and self-defeating in our enthusiasm first for washing our dirty linen in public (as the Democrat Senate report was so eager to do)...


Friday, December 26, 2014

Google Chairman vilifies climate skeptics

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt confirms that Google is off the climate deep end:
In a recent interview with National Public Radio, .... Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said his company “has a very strong view that we should make decisions in politics based on facts. And the facts of climate change are not in question anymore. Everyone understands climate change is occurring, and the people who oppose it are really hurting our children and our grandchildren and making the world a much worse place. We should not be aligned with such people. They’re just literally lying.”
It's not surprising that an Obama advisor+bank-roller and green philanthropist would take a leftist climate hysterical position.  But it is disturbing that a company that has such huge propaganda power at its disposal has openly declared such blatant political bias.



Thursday, December 25, 2014

Merry Christmas!

From Pope Francis - not so much:
... Pope Francis steeped his Christmas message to the world Thursday in sadness for those with little cause for joy — abused children, refugees, hostages and others suffering from violence in the Middle East, Africa, Ukraine and elsewhere. ...
And, from the Prime Minister - pray for our soldiers killing ISIS barbarians in Iraq


Wednesday, December 24, 2014

The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels

Whatever the "morality" of using fossil fuels, Ezra Levant made the case for "Ethical Oil" from Canadian oil fields versus "unethical" oil from dirty, human rights abusing third world dictatorships.

Now philosopher Alex Epstein makes the "moral" case for fossil fuels, PERIOD!  The following three excerpts from his new book "The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels" were published in the Nat Po:

Making the world a better place — by using more fossil fuels

Wrapping our minds around climate change

The sustainability myth

Looks like an excellent read. I'm buying it.

 


Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Magnotta found guilty

Phew, that's a relief!  Just this morning there was considerable front-page hand-wringing about why the jury was taking so long:
... Jurors may have split into bitter, screaming factions. They may have been trapped for days by a single, stubborn holdout. In the close quarters and high stress of sequestration, they may even have been tormented by simmering sexual tensions. ...


Theodore Dalrymple

Lately, I've been reading a lot of Theodore Dalrymple:
Anthony (A.M.) Daniels (born 11 October 1949), who generally uses the pen name Theodore Dalrymple, is an English writer and retired prison doctor and psychiatrist. He worked in a number of Sub-Saharan African countries as well as in the east end of London. Before his retirement in 2005, he worked in City Hospital, Birmingham and Winson Green Prison in inner-city Birmingham, England. ...
Daniel Hannan's take:
... The doctor’s oeuvre takes pessimism about human nature to a new level. Yet its tone is never patronising, shrill or hectoring. Once you get past the initial shock of reading about battered wives, petty crooks and junkies from a non-Left perspective, you find humanity and pathos.

... It’s striking that many of those who are the most relentlessly upbeat about the perfectibility of man ... are in person sour and humourless. Theodore Dalrymple, by contrast, is gloomy in theory, but sunny in practice. Perhaps conservatism is the secret of inner peace.
Essays.

Books.


Sunday, December 21, 2014

The roots of cultural decline - liberal intellectualism

Theodore Dalrymple, in his essay "Seeing is Not Believing",  traces the roots of cultural decline in British society:
... Violence, vulgarity, and educational failure: three aspects of modern English life that are so obvious and evident that it requires little observational power to discern them. Indeed, it requires far more mental effort and agility not to discern them, to screen them out of one's consciousness ...

It is worth examining the mental mechanisms that liberal intellectuals use to disguise the truth from themselves and others, and to ask why they do so.

First, there is outright denial. ...

Second, there is the tendentious historical comparison or precedent. ...

 Third, once the facts are finally admitted under the duress of accumulated evidence, their moral significance is denied or perverted....

Every liberal prescription worsened the problem that it was ostensibly designed to solve. But every liberal intellectual had to deny that obvious consequence or lose his [deeply ingrained world view] ...
A little long but well worth the read.


Saturday, December 20, 2014

The truth about Big Oil

Kelly McParland:
... Environmental zealots like to pretend B.O. is some massive corporate conspiracy run by a few fat cat plutocrats with cigars and evil laughs, but if that was the case they’d hardly have engineered a massive collapse in their wealth just before Christmas. B.O. is more like the weather: just because it’s sunny and warm today doesn’t mean it’s going to stay that way. And what autocrat would bet their economy on the weather?

Friday, December 19, 2014

Obama's appeasement of Cuba

Krauthammer: "Is there no tyrant or anti-American centre in the world Obama will not appease for nothing in return?"


Marco Rubio: "[Rand Paul] has no idea what he's talking about". What's hurting the Cuban people isn't the embargo, it's the corrupt, incompetent, repressive, radically socialist policies of the Castro dictatorship:

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

New York State to ban fracking

The anti-fracking scaremongers score another win.  And it's all political:
... Fracking, as it is known, was heavily promoted as a source of economic revival for depressed communities along New York’s border with Pennsylvania, and Mr. Cuomo had once been poised to embrace it.

... For Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, the decision on fracking — which was immediately hailed by environmental and liberal groups — seemed likely to help repair his ties to his party’s left wing.

...  the acting state health commissioner, Dr. Howard A. Zucker, said the examination had found “significant public health risks” associated with fracking.  “We cannot afford to make a mistake,” he said. “The potential risks are too great. In fact, they are not even fully known.” [Risks too great? Not fully known? In spite of a million plus fracked wells across the country, over 60 years, with no significant adverse environmental effects?]

... As he traveled around the state, Mr. Cuomo was hounded by protesters opposed to fracking, who showed up at his events and pressed him to impose a statewide ban. Opponents were also aided by celebrities who drew attention to their cause. ...

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

I can breathe

...Tweets AdolfJoeBiden:


Climate fascism

From the Vancouver Observer**:
 






























... a curious ad denying fossil fuel-driven climate change appeared on the Tinseltown marquee downtown Vancouver on a Pattison Outdoor sign.

... Friends of Science, a Calgary-based nonprofit group that disputes climate change, bought the ad.

Richard Littlemore, co-author of 'Climate Cover-up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming' and former journalist: 
 "There ought to be an instrument that punishes companies that profit from the imminent destruction of humankind. You would hope for some level of corporate responsibility that would have spared us from this", he said.
Littlemore said he can't understand why skeptics still want to keep the debate open on climate change.

... Jimmy Pattison (owner of the Jim Pattison Group) should be ashamed of himself...he should be accountable for what’s up on his sign."

You'd hope Littlemore, as a "former journalist", would have a higher regard for free speech and that he'd think what is really hard to understand is why anyone would want "to keep the debate" closed.  But, being a typical lefty demagogue, his fascist tendencies override any possibility of clear thought.

** a "news" journal infested with green activists.

Lima climate talks: The same old farce

Christopher Booker, The Telegraph:
... 9,000 delegates have spent two weeks trying to agree on that “universal climate treaty” they hope to see signed in Paris next year. In trampling over the 1,500-year-old “Nazca Lines” etched in the desert earth, the “environmentalists” can little have thought this would so enrage the Peruvians that they are now being threatened with six years in prison. 

... Lima is just yet another re-enactment of the three-stage ritual that has become only too familiar over the past 20 years. ... So the dreary farce will continue until the crack of doom ...





 Marc Morano and Walt Cunningham on UN Climate TV at the Lima Summit:


Marc Morano: "The UN is first and foremost political and they have bastardized science to achieve a political end ..."

Monday, December 15, 2014

"The cause of the Canada-U.S. price gap is obvious — the government"

Mark Milke:
... the federal government recently introduced legislation — dubbed the Price Transparency Act — that will force retailers to explain why Canadians sometimes pay higher prices than Americans for the same products. 
... To think a government is remotely capable of collecting and properly collating this type of comparative information assumes a degree of specific knowledge that governments do not possess, as it would be impossible to track the millions of business decisions that are made on a daily basis.
... All of this ...ignores one significant reason why some prices in Canada are higher than those in the United States: government policy.  ... For example ... Ontario’s rising electricity costs ... federal “supply management” policies ... airline fares - federal government policy that prevents full cabotage ...
Several others have also written about James Moore’s proposed law:
Andrew Coyne: The whole ‘Canada-U.S. price gap’ issue is a con surrounded by hypocrisy
John Ivison: Moore trades tariff relief for discredited 1970s policies
Peter Foster: Regulations R Us

All make excellent points.  There is certainly nothing “conservative” about such regulation.  We are blessed with (mostly) free markets in this country.  Retailers are best able to price their products in those markets and consumers are perfectly capable of sorting out where to buy them and deciding what price is fair.  The government should not be meddling with or attempting to micro-manage retail businesses.

CIA "torture" report's "pathological sanctimony"

Wall Street Journal editorial writer, Dorothy Rabinowitz:
... [The Senate report] is "as good as any expression of pathological sanctimoniousness that has characterized every attitude towards every effort America has taken to defend itself.

... [It is] rooted to the hostility of the idea that America is anything but a flawed, deeply immoral nation.  You cannot go on the campuses of the United States without hearing this as the general opinion." ...

Sunday, December 14, 2014

Take back the night!

Ann Coulter:
Sorry this column is late. I got raped again on the way home. Twice. I should clarify -- by "raped," I mean that two seductive Barry White songs came on the radio, which, according to the University of Virginia, constitutes rape.
...TAKE BACK THE NIGHT!
 ... Rolling Stone's fantasist rape victim told The Washington Post she didn't report her rape or go to the hospital because "she was new to campus and unaware of the resources available to her."
... The main threat to college students' physical and emotional safety these days comes not from athletes or fraternity members, but from the feminists. ...

Saturday, December 13, 2014

CIA "torture" report - unctuous condescension and hypocritical nonsense

Charles Krauthammer:
The report by Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee regarding CIA interrogation essentially accuses the agency under George W. Bush of war criminality.

...It’s a common theme (often echoed by President Obama): Amid panic and disorientation, we lost our moral compass and made awful judgments. ...

... It’s a kind of temporary-insanity defense for the Bush administration. And it is not just unctuous condescension but hypocritical nonsense.

... To make that case, to produce a prosecutorial brief so entirely and relentlessly one-sided, the committee report (written solely by Democrats) excluded any testimony from the people involved and variously accused. None. No interviews, no hearings, no statements. ...
Then there's the media:

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Burnaby Mountain Unmasked

Greg Renouf has investigated and documented in minute detail what happened and who was involved in "protesting" Kinder Morgan's work on Burnaby Mountain.  He supplies pictures, videos and narrative.  He supplies the backgrounds of and links between the professionals protesters, the NGO's, the SFU academics and orgs, the Indians, the radicals, the extremists and the gullible useful idiots:

Part I: Is It Safe To Send Your Kids To SFU?

Part II: David Suzuki, Extremists And The RCMP

Part III - coming soon.
 Outstanding work, absolutely outstanding.

James Moore's urge to micro-manage

If it isn't James Moore telling Tim Horton's how to run it's business,  it's James Moore policing prices at Toys R Us and every other cross-border business.  This is conservatism?

Must be an election coming.


The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee's tortured report

Most reasonable people would agree that investigating and reporting on alleged abuses by a government agency (any government agency) is a good thing.  It would also be good if there were bi-partisan support for the report and for releasing it.

Unfortunately, the release of Senate Democrat's scathing report on CIA interrogation practices was greeted with accusations of partisanship and hypocrisy, praise from a Republican (John McCain), condemnation from a Democrat (Bob Kerrey) and even criticism from CNN.

The Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, said the Dems decided to release the report now because:
“... we lose control. At the end of this year, the Republicans take control. And there’s some evidence that this report would never see the light of day,” she continued. “We believe it should see the light of day."

New AFN Chief of chiefs elected

Saskatchewan Chief Perry Bellegarde has won the leadership of the Assembly of First Nations after just one ballot.  Of the 464 ballots cast among chiefs, he easily exceeded the more than 60 per cent needed to win ...
 And nothing will change:
... the AFN, despite its name and high profile, doesn’t represent the natives of Canada. It represents the chiefs. There are more than 630 of them, and they are no more capable of reaching a workable consensus on contentious issues than are the premiers of Canada’s provinces, which number only 10.

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Dhimmi Senators can't accept truths about Islamism in Canada

... especially, it seems, when those truths come from truly moderate Muslims.

First it was Tarek Fatah'a testimony,

now it's Salim Mansur's:
I know many wonderful and amazing remarkable Muslim people, Canadians and otherwise,” said Liberal committee member Sen. Grant Mitchell. “When you say that mosques are the incubators of Islamism, surely you’re not saying that they all are?”

Mansur didn’t back down. ...
[via]

The myth of the "power of diversity"

Minding the Campus:
... Based on a 2007 book The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies by Professor Scott Page ... the idea that diversity trumps ability has become widely accepted. It is often given as a justification for continuing and even expanding “diversity” programs.

... With a chorus of believers singing this tune, it too attained the status of conventional wisdom. Hardly anyone bothered to question it – until now. ...  

... Mathematics professor Abigail Thompson ... tears Page’s work apart. She says that Page’s analysis is an example of the misuse of mathematics in the social sciences. It is something that merely gave “a scientific veneer to the diversity field,” she writes.  

... Another mathematics professor ... Aaron Robertson of Colgate University ... derided the findings of Page and Hong as “vacuous or at best highly trivial statements.”...

Monday, December 8, 2014

Canadian hate-monger praises synagogue massacre

CJN:
... Writing in the Nov. 28 edition of Meshwar, a free newspaper circulated in southwest Ontario, editor Nazih Khatatba approved the Nov. 18 Har Nof massacre as a “courageous and qualitative” operation.

The attack “ushers a new phase which should properly be called the phase of the new Fedayeen, fighters who sacrifice their life in battle,” wrote Khatatba, who is also a board member of Palestine House in Mississauga.
...
Another Muslim scumbag!

[via]

Thursday, December 4, 2014

Preston Manning's appalling proposal

Peter Foster explains:
It sounds so simple. “We” need a fiscal system that produces more of what we want – good, clean jobs — and less of what we don’t want, which is “pollution.” Let’s call it an “ecofiscal” approach.

...  we need a carbon tax. But since taxes have such a bad name, why not change the name to a carbon “levy”?

... Mr. Manning, who heads the Manning Centre for Building Democracy, is also an advisor to the new, self-appointed Canadian Ecofiscal Commission, which aspires – like a cloister full of medieval scholastics – to set a “just price” for industrial emissions and thus fine tune a woefully inadequate market(ish) economy.
See also, Terence Corcoran: Why the call for bigger and better carbon taxes is about to escalate
... A decade of bad policy, including Canada’s disastrous National Energy Program, followed the first OPEC crisis. The challenge in 2014 is to avoid making a new series of policy disasters.

Sunday, November 30, 2014

"It is difficult to conceive a more retrograde idea ..."

Rex Murphy:
.... it is with more grief than anger that I caught the story of an Ottawa “vigil” this week, held after a Missouri grand jury said it would not charge police officer Darren Wilson in the death of Ferguson teenager Michael Brown. Organizers of the rally asked “white/non-black allies” to “refrain from taking up space” and “never be the centre of anything.” 

That last phase “never be at the centre of anything” is particularly troubling. It is so defiantly categorical and universally — “anything” — dismissive.

The phrase and the other gibberish attending it should serve as a motto for every meeting and seminar dedicated to diversity as the governing motto for how not to engage with social issues, how not to bridge the real differences that can exist between people. ...
Rex's column is a very thoughtful take on a good example of what our universities are churning out these days.  Humanities faculties at virtually every university, against all logic, embrace  hare-brained, radical, po-mo social theories as if they were established scientific fact.  It has become what most "progressives" accept unquestioningly as mainstream thought.  The damage done to students' brains, society at large and to tax payers' wallets is enormous.


Saturday, November 29, 2014

Tarek Fatah hammers smug Liberal Senator

Liberal Senator Grant Mitchell, a smug, arrogant, self-righteous, finger-waving tool ("pr*ck" for short), met more than his match at a recent Senate hearing, when he tried to lecture Tarek Fatah on Islam:


[via]

It's good to see that this video is receiving such wide attention.

Here's Tarek with Michael Coren. And here's Tarek's Sun column on 'de-radicalization' of Islamic radicals.

Mitchell has a reputation for smug, self-righteous arrogance.  Here are two posts from three years ago when the topic was climate change.


Friday, November 28, 2014

Indians balking at transparency

Brian Lilley:
One of the biggest themes in politics right now is transparency, letting the taxpayers, the people who foot the bill, know where their money is being spent. Most politicians have accepted it but others continue to fight.

This week a group of Native leaders announced they would take the federal government to court to challenge the First Nations Financial Transparency Act.  ...
Here in BC the Legislative Assembly makes the law on financial accountability/transparency applicable to all municipalities, towns and cities in the province.  They are required to publicly account for every penny of taxpayers' money spent.  Also by law, they are required to publicly reveal the salaries of every public servant earning $75,000 or more (by name, alphabetically).  I'm sure this is also the case for every other municipality, town and city across the country.

As the provinces are for their municipalities, etc, the federal government is responsible for setting the rules for financial accounting on Indian Reserves. Chief Fox and others objecting to this (as "racist", no less) is absolutely asinine.  Their objections to financial transparency are beyond bizarre! (the only possible reason is that they have some very interesting things to hide).  What is also bizarre is that such laws haven't always been in place.

I doubt they have legal leg to stand on, but should their attempt to avoid accountability make it into court let's hope they don't draw some bone-head of a liberal judge who sympathizes with them.


Tuesday, November 25, 2014

The Trudeau Foundation

Peter Foster:
The Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation last week held a conference titled “Weathering Change: Pathways to Sustainability in Canada. It confirmed that the pathway to serfdom now makes its way through the thickets of climate hysteria, past social-mediated mobs, and via smokeless backrooms filled with radical NGOs. ...
... essentially a sleeper cell to promote the kind of big and pervasive government favoured by its eponymous hero, who died in 2000, and now by his son, Justin. It was endowed in 2002, by a Liberal government, with $125-million of taxpayers’ money....
One big strategic difference since the days of Trudeau pere is that much of the bogus conversation has been hijacked by radical environmental groups masquerading as “civil society.”

Who knew?

Obama - the guest from Hell

Mathew Fisher:
There are ominous parallels in how U.S. President Barack Obama deliberately humiliated Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott ... and how the American leader has kept Prime Minister Stephen Harper waiting at the altar for several years by withholding approval of the XL Keystone pipeline.

... Obama has cavalierly threatened close ties with two of the few countries the U.S. has always counted on when the world has gone berserk.

... Obama ignored the advice of his own embassy in Canberra that such a commentary would badly damage relations. Moreover, Obama failed to mention to Abbott his desire to deliver a speech in Australia during several long conversations that the two men had at the APEC leaders’ summit two weeks ago in Beijing.

...  Ignoring diplomatic protocol when visiting a friendly country, the White House refused to give its hosts a copy of the president’s speech or even a summary of what was in it.

... What Obama did at the University of Queensland was intervene in this country’s often intense internal debate about climate change.

... the Abbott government was left fuming about their visitor’s insults

... Obama’s comments in Brisbane made a total nonsense of the White House’s stated intention ...

... the preaching and disloyalty ... is immensely unhelpful at a time when China and India are ascendant, the Russian bear is marauding through Ukraine and threatening Georgia, Moldova, the Baltic states and Poland, and the Middle East is becoming an increasingly unpredictable cauldron of dysfunctional states.
Talk about guests from Hell!  Let's face it, the man is a complete a**h*le, and a dangerous one at that.  Two more years is a long time to have a rogue American president on the loose.


Monday, November 24, 2014

Why the Burnaby Mountain protesters will make no difference to the Kinder Morgan project

Brent Stafford in Vancouver's "24 Hours" :
These Kinder Morgan protesters have a lot of nerve. Who elected them to speak for the “people?” No one. They only speak for a small hyper-ideological fringe that is radically hell bent on upending our entire economic system. ...

...  the protests have nothing to do with an impending danger to the local environment. It’s all about fighting capitalism and the primary target is the fossil fuel industry. ... 

... It is for this very reason the people protesting Kinder Morgan will make no difference. Their demands are unreasonable and entirely unfeasible. And I suspect they know that. ...
Good for Mr. Stafford.  News and opinion on this subject much more often than not foolishly sympathizes with the protesters, lending them undeserved attention and legitimacy.


How a "green" journalist came to hate radical environmentalists

Elizabeth Nickson explains how she came to write her book "Eco-Fascists: How Radical Conservationists Are Destroying Our Natural Heritage":



It's an excellent book, by the way.  She has, in the process of researching it, become a great advocate for property rights.

See also, Agenda 21.

The push for taxes on "carbon"

Progressives have been ramping up the rhetoric for a "tax on carbon" or, euphemistically, "pricing carbon".  The usual suspects  have been doing so for some time and more recently it came from a less predicable quarter, Preston Manning.

It's worth reminding ourselves of the reasons to push back:
Finance Minister Joe Oliver: the "multibillion-dollar tax on everything"
Lorne Gunter: "Heaven help us ..."

BC, the first jurisdiction in North America to impose such a tax, is frequently held up by carbon tax pushers as a shining success.  Aldyen Donnelly points out why that and related claims are a myth:
... BC Ministry of Finance budget documents show, clearly, that total demand for the B.C. carbon-taxed products grew faster after the carbon-tax was introduced than over almost every other similar timeframe between 1992 and 2008.




Time to audit Elizabeth May

Elizabeth Nickson:
There are many things May seems to dislike about Canada and she has a catastrophic view of our future if we don't do what she recommends. The free market is seen as a disaster writ large; she holds strongly the views of ... economist Thomas Pilketty, who recommends massive income redistribution. Her list is long: we are a petro state and are threatened by oil, pipelines, frakking, fish farming, carbon, the “tar” sands, industrial farming, meat eating, population growth, biodiversity collapse, the stock market, banks, ozone, development, and especially, the rich. ...

... Seductive as she may seem, Elizabeth May’s Canadian dream is a luxury we cannot afford. [Actually, May's "dream" would lead to the opposite of "luxury" as in poverty for all.]

Sunday, November 23, 2014

Obama's climate surrender to China

Rex Murphy:
Much is being made of Barack Obama’s “deal” with China ...

... For those who still retain their enthusiasm for the lame-duck... the announcement was a milestone in the fight against our ecological doom, an historical commitment.  ... the deal “shames” Canada, “isolates” us, puts us in the overcrowded villains gallery ...

Mr. Obama ... has told China that the U.S., which even now is on a downward slope in CO2 emissions, is willing to bind itself to continuing that downward slope for the next 16 years. ...

... And in return, what does the deal promise from China’s side? ... China has a 16-year holiday to keep accelerating its development, building a coal-powered plant every 8 to 10 days.  ... Why cannot Canada take the offer the U.S. made to China? [Because Canadian eco-freaks, egged on by a gullible leftist media, would go nuts].


... So this great historic deal is really nothing more than ... a last gasp for Mr. Obama, a placation to the always fierce warming constituency, and for the Chinese, a little chuckle or two at how easy it is to charm the eagerly gullible.
Charles Krauthammer:
Climate enthusiasts will say that I refuse to take yes for an answer. Of course I would take yes for an answer. But the Obama-Xi agreement is not yes. It is “check back with me in 16 years.” Aren’t the people advocating this deal the same garment-rending climate apocalypticists who’ve been warning of irreversible planetary changes beginning now, and the supreme imperative of acting immediately?
Except, you see, for China, the world’s No. 1 carbon polluter. It gets a 16-year pass.

Friday, November 21, 2014

Preston Manning - a traitor to his former conservative self






It would be interesting to know what has caused Preston's about face on conservative principles he so clearly championed as Reform leader. Advocating the use of weasel words to dupe the public into accepting a carbon tax does not sound like the Preston Manning I once voted for. Though we have to acknowledge that he has been spouting the sustainability mantra for several years.

Something happened to bring about his apparently new-found enthusiasms for more taxes, bigger government and Orwellian propaganda. It can't be evidence for the threat of man-made global warming - that has become nothing but weaker over the past two decades. Though since it figures in his push for a disguised carbon tax he's using it exactly as eco and far-left radicals do - as a tool to sell the public on an agenda they wouldn't otherwise support.

So what is it that motivates Preston's uncharacteristic, anti-conservative new stance? Why has he turned traitor to his former principles? "Green" seems to figure strongly. Maybe we should follow the money. Where does the Manning Centre get its green? Maybe it's from Big Green - eg. gigabuck foreign foundations like Tides, Rockefeller, Hewlett, etc.
[Update: Ezra notes that Manning is a member of the Pembina Institute Advisory Council. You can't get much more progressive and radically environmental than Pembina which has links to Tides and the Suzuki Foundation. See also.]

Whatever it is, it's sad.

Sign Ezra's petition.

Thursday, November 20, 2014

Aussie Foreign Minister chides Obama

From Radio Australia:
... Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has criticised US president Barack Obama for a speech in Brisbane last weekend in which he claimed climate change threatened the Great Barrier Reef.

... Ms Bishop is not the only Coalition politician to voice criticism of Mr Obama, with frontbenchers Joe Hockey[Treasurer] and Jamie Briggs [Infr & Reg Dev] making comments in the wake of the Brisbane speech.


How Obama dishonored the latest American victim of the Islamic State

Mark Steyn - A Death in Syria
... I would like also to note another example of presidential brazenness this week - Barack Obama's reaction to the latest beheading of a US citizen by the head hackers of the Islamic State. Peter Kassig's death video was not as the others ...

... In his response to the beheading of Peter Kassig, Obama chose to turn a man who may have died heroically into just another Muslim victim:
Abdul-Rahman was taken from us in an act of pure evil by a terrorist group that the world rightly associates with inhumanity... ISIL's actions represent no faith, least of all the Muslim faith which Abdul-Rahman adopted as his own.
 "Abdul-Rahman"? Why, yes. Mr Kassig supposedly converted to Islam while imprisoned by the Islamic State. That's to say, his submission to Islam was at the point of a sword.
... In the same video in which "Jihadi John" appears with Mr Kassig's head, the Islamic State are seen decapitating 13 fellow Muslims from the Syrian army. If you're a Muslim, you get the group beheading with the crowd-scene extras. If you're an American or Briton, you get the star role, the solo act. The Islamic State knew which group Peter Kassig belonged to even if the President didn't.

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

More BS about polar bears

This week the media have been dutifully spreading more alarmist misinformation about declining polar bear numbers.  WUWT, via a Canadian expert,  supplies the true story:
Dr Susan Crockford, a Canadian zoologist and professor with more than 35 years experience, has been highly critical of these stories, claiming that they are misleading the public.

Responding to the claims in the media, Dr Crockford said:
“The main story of this study is the remarkable recovery of the polar bear population by 2010 which has likely continued since then. To suggest that polar bear populations have been declining is hugely misleading.
“The authors have also acknowledged that the cause of the 2004-2006 decline was heavy spring ice conditions. They found no correlation for the decline with summer sea ice conditions.”
 Would it be too much to ask the so-called "professional" journalists of the mainstream media to do some basic fact checking before reporting these stories?  Probably, they're more interested in promoting climate alarmism than in science.


Australia is reminded that with friends like Obama, who needs enemies?

In that speech of Obama's at the University of Queensland, Aussie Greg Sheridan, writing in the Wall Street Journal, notes a mystifying attack on Australia:
President Obama over the weekend made a bizarre decision to attack and damage his closest ally in Asia, and one of the most committed supporters of U.S. foreign policy.

.... the longest passage was an extraordinary riff on climate change that contained astonishing criticism—implied, but unmistakable—of the government led by Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

... As some congressional Democrats recently learned, the only thing fraught with more danger than being Mr. Obama’s enemy is being his friend.
Obama, ever the traitor to the West, puts his radical leftist ideology and what he thinks is good for his legacy ahead of everything.  As Israel learned long ago, he's intensely divisive not only at home, but abroad as well.  The man's a menace.  For the good of the entire civilized world, 2016 can't come too soon.


Global warming causes global cooling






[h/t WUWT]

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Conservatives win two by-elections, Trudeau takes a victory lap

By-elections in Whitby-Oshawa (Cons margin +8.5%) and Yellowhead (Cons margin +42.6%).  For Justin Trudeau, that means it's time for a victory speech:



Bryn Weiss points out that the turnout for both byelections was crappy - for Whitby Oshawa 32% and for Yellowhead a miserable 16%.  The tiny Yellowhead turnout says to me that conservative voters stayed away in droves (liberal voters not so much) and that in 2015 when the turnout doubles, triples or quadruples that margin in favour of Conservatives will rise accordingly.  Whitby-Oshawa - who knows?


Monday, November 17, 2014

Sunday, November 16, 2014

Latest poll shows a continuing travesty

A Nanos poll released Nov 12th ...

... has Stephen Harper taking the lead as Canada's preference for PM. 

Well, that's good one supposes, but that Trudeau's numbers remain anywhere near Harper's is a continuing travesty that reflects very poorly on Canadians' sensibilities, seriousness and maturity.

Saturday, November 15, 2014

American Lameduck Goofball-in-Chief wows Aussie students

At the University of Queensland:
U.S. President Barack Obama gave a landmark speech ... where his call for immediate action to protect the Great Barrier Reef was met with rousing applause.

... In a pot shot at Russian President Vladimir Putin's administration, Mr Obama said the United States was 'leading in opposing Russia's aggression, which is a threat to the world - which we saw in the appalling shoot down of MH17'. [So, he admits that what Russia is getting away with in Ukraine is thanks to US "leadership".  That's why Putin is shaking in his boots.]

It's easy to see why he picked a university to deliver his feckless bullcrap.

[via]

Harper to Putin: "Get out of Ukraine"

At the G20 summit:
Reluctantly accepting Putin’s hand, Harper was said to have told him: “I’ll shake your hand, but I only have one thing to say to you: Get out of Ukraine.”...
Putin’s terse rejoinder was “that’s impossible because we are not there,” the Russian leader’s spokesman later told Canadian journalists. ... This is total nonsense. ...
More at Metanoodle.

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Confusing and contradictory results from Health Canada wind turbine noise study

Health Canada recently released a summary of results from its study of Wind Turbine Noise and Health.  Findings were confusing and apparently contradictory.  From the Health Canada report:

The following were not found to be associated with WTN exposure:
  • self-reported sleep (e.g., general disturbance, use of sleep medication, diagnosed sleep disorders);
  • self-reported illnesses (e.g., dizziness, tinnitus, prevalence of frequent migraines and headaches) and chronic health conditions (e.g., heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes); and
  • self-reported perceived stress and quality of life.
The following was found to be statistically associated with increasing levels of WTN:
  • annoyance towards several wind turbine features (i.e. noise, shadow flicker, blinking lights, vibrations, and visual impacts).
Further down in the report:
5.3 Annoyance and Health
  • WTN annoyance was found to be statistically related to several self-reported health effects including, but not limited to, blood pressure, migraines, tinnitus, dizziness, scores on the PSQI, and perceived stress.
  • WTN annoyance was found to be statistically related to measured hair cortisol, systolic and diastolic blood pressure.
Huh? WTN exposure IS NOT associated with a bunch of bad health effects but WTN annoyance (caused by WTN exposure) IS associated with the same bunch of bad health effects and then some.

Any guesses how this will be received by the wind industry and its media supporters and by the people who have to live near wind turbines?

Here's the angry reaction from North American Platform Against Wind Power (NA-PAW).

Lest we forget




... but, sadly, there are some, such as the disgraceful Greater Essex County School Board, who are enabling disloyalty to Canadians who died for our freedoms:



Monday, November 10, 2014

TOP 5 Conservative Principles

Bill Whittle's, that is... contrasted with progressives' ...

Friday, November 7, 2014

Trudeau's ideas on ISIS and Iraq "idotic", "a bad joke"


Justin ("Neville") Trudeau:



"Idiotic." That's how ... Jason Kenney put the idea to offer "cold winter" advice to the victims of ISIS.

Justin Trudeau now thinks the responsibility to protect doesn't mean eliminating genocidal jihadi maniacs, but rather giving people brochures on how to get through the winter. This is just a bad joke," said Kenney​.

Thursday, November 6, 2014

Media Party group-think on global warming

The lede in Ezra's segment is a medley of Media Party reactions to the latest IPCC report.  An excellent example of the prevailing media group-think (or, rather, useful idiot group-non-think) :



How Canada gains from Obama's loss

Lawrence Solomon counts the ways:
Number One on the Obama Can’t-Do list involves carbon taxes or other global warming measures that could set back Canada’s economy ... a prescient Prime Minister Harper tied Canada’s global warming policies to those of the United States. ... Harper — thought to be a closet climate skeptic — took a calculated risk that paid off in spades. ...

Number Two on the Obama Can’t-Do List is trade protectionism, a favourite among many Democrats including Obama ...

Number Three: Canada can also breathe a big sigh of relief that free spending Democrats are now reined in. ...Obama’s exploding of the national debt — by the time he’s done, it may have doubled to $20-trillion

Pundits are betting that Obama will finally approve Keystone ... But the pundits could be wrong. Obama has betrayed most of his constituents through broken promises ... But even chucking Keystone could now be too late for Obama. He has become such a liability to his party that few Democratic politicians have a strong allegiance to him ...

See also Peter Foster: Mr. Obama, pull down that anti-Keystone XL wall
 

Tuesday, November 4, 2014

The UN IPCC's synthetic climate alarmism

Peter Foster: Dedicated to promoting synthetic climate alarmism
 The latest synthesis report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the “capstone” of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report — contains no surprises

However, it is intriguing for ... the identity of the man to whom it is dedicated — the late Stephen Schneider, a Stanford professor and proponent of bending science in pursuit of a “better world.”  ... famous for his recommendation in 1989 that in order to get “loads of media coverage,” scientists had to “offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.” ... For the IPCC to honour him tells us a great deal about its own orientation which, fortunately, is becoming less relevant by the day.
Also,
... It is filled with what eminent Canadian mathematician Christopher Essex has called “hilarious bamboozling parascientific probability language."
The "new" UN report has driven local and national media climate alarmism for going on a week now -  exactly what Prof Schneider advocated and the IPCC sought.  So, by dedicating it to Schneider maybe the IPCC was, in its own weird, sneaky way, being honest for a change.

See also:IPCC focus on stopping global warming and extreme weather is unscientific and immoral



Thursday, October 30, 2014

Disgusting! The Ottawa Citizen provides a platform to a convicted Islamist killer

Giving a convicted Islamist killer op-ed space in a newspaper is bad enough.  But doing it on the day of the funeral of a victim of Islamist terrorism is beyond the pale.  The editors of the Ottawa Citizen should hang their heads in shame.



I think Ezra had it right when he opined that the op-ed was actually drafted by the murderer's lawyers as propaganda in their lawsuit against the Canadian taxpayers.  That makes the Ottawa Citizen complicit in a law suit on behalf a convicted terrorist.  Even more disgusting!

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Trying to understand the liberal mindset

Ezra Levant explores "Why liberals downplay terrorism":
... Their first reflex is to deny that it’s terrorism at all ...
... The next liberal reflex is to deny that an attacker is Muslim.
... The third liberal reflex is to say a terrorist attack was just the act of a madman.
... The fourth liberal line of defence is to say the attacker is a lone wolf.

... That’s the liberal spin playbook: deny it’s terrorism, deny it’s Muslim, call it insanity, and finally call it a rogue act.

... But why? Why do liberals go to such lengths to revise the motives of terrorists, who are quite clear about their goals?  ... Why do liberals try to revise history, and whitewash the war against us?
Because ...
... liberals have abolished the ideas of good and evil as too judgmental. Terrorists? No, our enemies are actually victims themselves, you see. We are privileged. Society is to blame.
...Liberals cannot understand so much hate against us. So liberals sympathize. Liberals help find the answer. They join in. To justify the hate. 
In today's Van Sun there were more than a half dozen letters illustrating the liberal mindset.

And here's a doozy - a recent National Post article began with "It's been a tough week for Canadian Muslims" [h/t Blazing Cat Fur] [As an aside - the article referred to a mosque in Cold Lake that had been vandalized, to which my reaction was: "Cold Lake has a mosque?"]

Update (from the comments): Mark Steyn back in 2010 on "Crying Lone Wolf" and more recently with Breitbart on the same theme.


Sunday, October 26, 2014

Ghomeshi Spanks The CBC In Open Letter

Blazing Cat Fur updates us on the Weird BDSM Sex Feud between the CBC & Ghomeshi

And what's to be made of Justin's leer? Is that before or after?

Saturday, October 25, 2014

Homegrown Brit jihadi dies in Kobani

A good argument for NOT withholding jihadi passports:
A 19-year-old former private school student has become the latest British-born jihadi to die fighting for ISIS in Syria. 

... the fourth fighter from the city of Portsmouth to be killed fighting for the terror group.

His family confirmed his death in a statement that said: "Mehdi was a loving boy with a good heart wishing to help Syrians...."

Hassan was also a prolific tweeter under his pseudonym Abu Dujana. In his last tweet before he died, he wrote:
"Between 20-40 us strikes daily in ayn al arab. Alhamdulillah they are spending $10's of billions...against themselves." 6:41 AM - 17 Oct 2014
Good riddance.

Liberals in denial