Ghosts of Liberals Past

This has me wishing that the end of this repackaged, uninspiring, sophomoric, oh-so-70's exercise in Trudeausocialism, turned policy nightmare would be Ludwig von Mises kicking Ignatieff's ass all the way back to Harvard.

Aside from that daydream... this article also exposes that revisionism is alive and well in the Liberal camp.

When this economic downturn started PM Harper attempted to stick to his conservative roots and to not play Keynesian Russian Roulette with taxpayer funded bullets. However, Jack Layton almost screaming in the House of Commons that "something had to be done for the workers", accompanied by much Liberal gnashing of teeth and beating of breasts demanding that "something be done for the economy" was enough to ignite the PM's pragmatic (and wholly political) survival instinct... Hence the hole being dug by politicians today, to be filled with taxpayer money tomorrow.

Truth be known that I agree with Mr. Ignatieff, the deficit is too high and the Conservatives are spending all too wildly. But Iggy's assumption that his own spending plan will not create such a deficit, and further that the money he is planning on spending will actually (miraculously) shrink the deficit is the kind of mental gymnastics that leads one to think that he can have his cake and eat it too.

Kelly McParland at the National Post takes the time to kick Ignatieff for both Ludwig and I...

How can they be hard-hearted tightwads and loose-spending wastrels at the same time? They're pouring money into the economy, which is bad. The Liberals would spend more, which is good. Interventionist government is good. But interventionist government by Tories is bad. We have to reduce protectionism. But anyone tries to buy a Canadian company and we'll drag them in front of a review board.

I don't get this Ignatieff guy. I can't figure out what he believes. Because I don't think he knows.

Read the whole thing.

Cleaning out my Philosophical Closet.

I have just gone through my bookmarks and deleted a quite popular conservative blog that I have followed for a number of years. as a matter of fact I think this was the first blog I ever began following and reading regularly. No, I'm not going to tell you which blog, this post isn't about that.

I deleted it because I finally saw (or acknowledged) it was racist. Now I'm not talking white supremacist, KKK/Black Panther, Neo-Nazi racist but the more insidious brand of racism, the kind that gets thrown into a conversation and is rarely called a spade as it were.

Its perpetrated by that sensible sounding guy that claims "I'm not talking about culture and I'm not racist." immediately after making a statement about "us letting other types of people into your country" and complaining that "they brought over their religion" and how now "it is all one big mess, because we were to nice and let them come into our country. Now they want everything and anything." While simultaneously blanking out the fact that that very desire (to live as one wishes), is what led people to populate North America in the first place.

It's the person that uses statistics, pointing out that "3.2 per cent of Spain's population was foreign-born in 1998. In 2007 it was 13.4 per cent. Europe's Muslim population has more than doubled in the past 30 years and will have doubled again by 2015. In Brussels, the top seven baby boys' names recently were Mohamed, Adam, Rayan, Ayoub, Mehdi, Amine and Hamza." and drawing a correlation between that fact and some nebulous apocalyptic future if the trend continues.

Incidentally these kinds of statistics pop up quite a bit in the media, reported as floating abstractions which offer nothing of substance to the point being made, and are rarely if ever connected, as they should be, to the vilest form of collectivism there is.

Now I'm no ostrich. I'm not burying my head in the sand and claiming that all cultures deserve the same respect. There is no reason to respect the systemic sexism or the religious violence advocated by some extreme forms of Islam because that is someone's "culture" any more that there is a valid claim that cannibalism should be accepted because the practice was connected to tribal custom in the Amazonian jungle.

On the whole race and culture denote nothing, it is an indication of nothing about the individual as an individual. You can no more decide the beliefs of a man based on his race or culture any more than you can determine the flavour of a wine from the shape and colour of the bottle.

Hippocrates Shrugged

In Obama's America, health care manages you...

45 percent of American physicians “would consider leaving their practice or taking an early retirement”

In the event that this 45% of doctors follow through, that would leave the rest not in a profession but in virtual slavery.

EDIT
An excellent post from F.I.R.M. (Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine) to add fuel to your intellectual fire.

Genes Of Evil...

''The American relatives have agreed not to have children to extinguish the saga of Hitler and stop living in fear, but have promised to publish a book before they die,'' said Mulders.

This is the sort of nonsense regurgitated by people who believe that your genetic code is the be all and end all of you, the individual. This is the ugly ignorant hand of determinism reaching out from beyond the grave to destroy what could be, or could have been vital productive lives of people who have themselves never done wrong.

Its a psychological, physiological and existential impossibility that being related to one of the most evil men in history means that you will somehow by the miracle of genetics pass that "sin" on to an offspring.

An equivalent lunacy would be to say that existing relatives of the Donner Party should never be allowed to cook at the campsite.

Ignatieff Begins With I

...and he is the I in team.

Metaphysical Value-Judgments

So much of what I post here is tinged with anger, incredulity and despair that I must seem to be a bitter sort, but that just isn't so.

Never the less its useful, cathartic and refreshing to show other sides of your self, even to yourself every now and then. So with that in mind I'd like to introduce you to one of my favorite artists Jack Vettriano.

Now I'm no art critic, but like the man says... I know what I like. For me the art deco coolness of Mr. Vettriano's work speaks of a time of limitless possibilities. It is simple, clean, not overly ornate and unabashedly sensual, sexual and occasionally erotic.

In Thoughts of You - Jack Vettriano

Don't Ever Forget

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What if Milton Friedman was addressing America's schoolchildren?

Although a President making an address to schoolchildren should not seem controversial, President Barack Obama has managed to arouse a great deal of resistance and opposition to his planned address.

The controversy isn't so much about the remarks of the address (which, being pitched to children, is relatively mild and uncontroversial in of itself), but the larger context of how the administration operates in general and the crude and ill conceived "learning package" that was planned to go with the speech, a package for America's schoolchildren which has all the hallmarks of indoctrination.

Perhaps it would be better if schoolchildren everywhere were to hear from notables like Milton Friedman. I pulled this gem from "Dr Helen":

I would rather think that the words of Milton Friedman from his book Capitalism and Freedom make more sense:

"The paternalistic 'what your country can do for you' implies that government is the patron, the citizen the ward, a view that is at odds with the free man's belief in his own responsibility for his own destiny. The organismic, 'what you can do for your country' implies that government is the master or the deity, the citizen, the servant or the votary. To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them. He is proud of a common heritage and loyal to common traditions. But he regards government as a means, an instrumentality, neither a grantor of favors, and gifts, nor a master or god to be blindly worshipped and served.

Now there is a lesson we can all get behind

To Vote... Yet Not To Vote

The Liberal's say they are going to "pull the plug" on the Conservatives minority government (they really, really, really, really, really mean it this time).

Now in most places on the planet when an election is held there are only a couple of reasons for doing so. Either the term of the sitting government is over and by law there has to be an election, or in a multi-party democracy a sitting minority government looses the support of the parliament (or what-have-you) over some real or politically important (imagined) issue.

My question is this... What is the issue (I'll even accept a "politically important" one at this point)? What is the reason that the Liberals have decided suddenly to stop supporting the Conservatives as they have done for the last 303 days? What is the point of spending another $300,000,000 to hold an election that no one outside of the Liberal and NDP spin factories even want?

What would the Liberals do differently? The Conservatives are already governing like Liberals anyway.

The Conservatives have completely divorced themselves from any sort of fiscal responsibility, they have shunned their small government conservative ideals, and they have bent over backwards to pay their way into the hearts and minds of anyone and everyone who they think might even remotely have a chance of voting for them. Sounds just like the Liberals to me.

PM Harper and his boys and girls have behaved like nothing more than Liberal dopplegangers so why should we Canadians have our time and our money wasted on a vote to replace one conjoined twin with the other?

What if they held an election and nobody showed up to vote? What if we were able to get less than 50% of the people of this country to show up for that 5 minutes of "civic duty"? Or better yet what if the usual number of people showed up but didn't mark their ballots, or wrote a personal note to government instead of choosing one empty suit over another.

You could write something small on a ballot, something like "Get to work..." or "Stop stealing from me..."

Politicians often make comments about elections sending them a "message from the voters" well lets send them all a message to smarten the %&@# up and stop wasting our time and money.

Update: Obama's Brownshirts Want Your Information

Seems the Obama administration is going to do a bunch of data mining from popular social networking sites. This initiative has an Orwellian feel to it. As one friend pointed out on FB, it bodes ill for both freedom of speech and freedom of association.

This, coupled with the other recent activities of America's first Socialist Government has some of our rights respecting southern cousins seeing Red, White and Blue.

H/T: Kelly

Barack Hussein Obama: Slightly left of Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev

The only thing missing from this are the "Comrade" and "Dear Leader" honorariums.

Honduras Update: "We Are Not Afraid..."

Roberto Micheletti spells it out for the OAS

"We are not afraid of an embargo by anybody.

"The country can carry on firmly and calmly without your support and that of other nations," he said after a meeting with the delegation.

"Nobody is coming here to impose anything on us, unless troops come from somewhere else and force us."

It amazes me that in light of Central Americas history of despotism, dictatorship and thuggery the world is now seeking to force Honduras to destroy its own constitution and return to that Banana Republic model.

Tax Haven

This just makes me want to move to Costa Rica.

No Tax for Pan-Am

1.4 billion

Bread and Circuses, that's what it was called back during the fall of the Roman Empire. The idea at the time was that the political leadership of the Empire could distract the citizenry, and make them to forget the realities of their day-to-day lives by staging elaborate games and spectacles in the colleseum.

Fast forward 2000 years... Now, in the middle of a recession, when people in the manufacturing heartland of Ontario (of which Hamilton is a part) are suffering from lay offs and plant closures all three arms of the government, municipal, provincial and federal, led by Dalton "Nero" McGinty think it's a good time to take more money from taxpaers to fund a sporting event?

Ridiculous!

No Tax For PanAm...

Huh?

On a day where this picture is captured on an online news aggregator...








I'm inclined to think The Onion has hit the nail on the head with this piece.



I used a previous post to lambaste politicians for their pragmatism but to be fair the average voter needs to learn how to stand for something unequivocally if we are ever going to do more than chase our electoral tails during and between elections...

Don’t Call It Moral.

The Scottish Judge who released Terrorist bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi the killer of 270 people over Lockerbie Scotland said in an interview with CNN that;

“Equally, we have values that we seek to live by, even if those who perpetrate crimes against us have not respected us or shown any compassion. Here is a dying man. He didn't show compassion to the victims, American or Scottish. That does not mean that we should lower ourselves, debase ourselves, or abandon our values.

He was justly convicted, but we're allowing him some mercy to return home to die.”

This statement by the judge implies the application of a moral standard, but morals are defined as; of, pertaining to, or concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong;

The last part is central to my point. Under Christian religious morality one should always find it in their heart to forgive a transgressor, no matter what it is that they have done wrong. This is the central tenant of Christian “morality”.

The problem is that it isn’t moral; it is specifically and implicitly amoral. It discards all concept of right and wrong and replaces it with the vilest abdication of thought imaginable. Christianity tries to make the devout follower indifferent to questions of right or wrong and wholly dependent and subservient to some mystical whim which is itself contradicted in Christian religious writings (including anecdotal evidence of god’s actions).

So here is your choice. You can believe in the Christian morality and try to walk your religious tightrope which lists a multitude of things as evil but also states that you should forgive any transgression no matter how vile, or you can apply the morality encapsulated in the sentence “In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.”

Quickly… Choose. Choose to compromise on any and all moral decisions, to abandon any principal based on the whim of a deity who himself fails to apply what he teaches, or you can take the hard line, the resolute stance to believe in right and wrong regardless of circumstance, immovable by whim, immutable by the mystic babbling of an invisible unknowable and completely inconsistent god.

UPDATE: Scottish Justice...

Is a dish best served at a "hero's" homecoming...



Sickening.

3 Months To Live

Megrahi was sentenced to life in prison in 2001 for taking part in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 on Dec. 21, 1988, and was to serve at least 27 years behind bars.

However, he was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer last year and doctors have said he has less than three months to live.

*

Well isn't that special. I wonder how much of that three months this terrorist mass murderer will spend laughing at the weakness of the west's version of "justice".

Less Than A Parent

Is this for the rights and interests of children or against the rights and interests of Fathers?

I understand the need to legally protect the rights of children in custody battles. Being minors their voice and interest can often be lost in their parents bitterness and sundry legal machinations.

But wouldn't it have been much more proper for Minister Nicholson to say;

"The interests of children must take priority over a father's a parents right to an equal parenting role after divorce,"

As spoken, the Minister is advocating the dismissal of one parents rights based soley upon sex. Many fathers already believe that in a divorce, the mother is given preferential treatment in custody and in today's day and age that is a crime.

The statement from the minister is nothing more than a glimpse at his own predjudice, and that of many other people. It is the predjudice that labels mothers as being the nurtuting, loving, child rearing masters of men, It is sexist, baseless, discriminatory and illegal.

It's high time that equality started to mean equality all the time for everyone in this country.

The Government Effect

Health reform in Canada... have none of these people ever heard of the law of unintended consequences?

Unintended consequences are outcomes that are not (or not limited to) the results originally intended in a particular situation. They may be foreseen or unforeseen, but they should be the logical or likely results of the action.

Now what do you think might be the unintended consequence of this:

"He has also said the Canadian system could be restructured to focus on patients if hospitals and health-care institutions received funding based on the patients they treat, instead of an annual, lump-sum budget.

This "activity-based funding" would be an incentive to provide more efficient care, he has said."

Dr Ouellet is counting on all those positive consequences he's already concluded would be the result. But understanding the nature of bureaucracy isn't his forte apparently.

Bureaucracy's love their budgets, its how they live. When they are given a set budget they will spend it all, every time, in the hopes that;

a) It won't be cut next year because they proved through frugality or efficiency that they did not need all the cash and;

b) That if they spend it all they will have the opportunity to ask for more for next year so that the bureaucracy can expand (as is their wont).

But the good Doctor is proposing an open budget. One that (apparently) rewards the bureaucracy for its efficiency.

But in the land of unintended consequences is quality a necessary part of the equation? No. The only necessary part of the equation would become processing the largest possible volume of patients to receive the largest possible payment.

This system would not be a problem in a free market because if the quality of the service dropped to meet the need of efficiency then the patient would be able to go somewhere else and the offending business would be forced out of business by the companies offering both quality and efficiency.

But since all hospitals in this country are state owned there is no hope for a market correction of that type, and what you would have is hospitals becoming sausage factories. With no reason to offer quality and efficiency, then efficiency (expediency) will win out.

Once that budgetary imperative has taken hold, the other unintended consequence will rear it's head, namely the cost of health care in this country will go through the roof, which means our taxes will go through the roof.

There ought to be a corollary to the Law of Unintended Consequences called "The Government Effect" stating simply that when any government program results in unintended consequences the cost of said unintended consequences is inevitably downloaded onto the individual in the form of some tax levied against him or some sacrifice of his freedom.