Exploiting Katrina

The Ancient Chinese believed that natural disasters have an impact on political life. Seeing the devastation caused by Katrina, it’s not hard to imagine how. But we are now seeing the proliferation of the opposite view. Many have truly reached record levels of ignorance in blaming a natural disaster on the political actions of one man, or a few men. They are the new obscurantists, armed with “science” as their new religion. It’s a “science” for which they can produce no evidence. To their minds, a divinised Nature is upset, and it will require nothing short of the sacrificial slaying of western industrial economies in order to pacify it. These folks are numerous, a large number of them have university degrees, they vote, and they would love to be in charge of us all.

See James Glassman on the absurdity of blaming Katrina on Kyoto.

Indeed, there is no evidence that hurricanes are intensifying anyway. For the North Atlantic as a whole, according to the United Nations Environment Programme of the World Meteorological Organization: “Reliable data…since the 1940s indicate that the peak strength of the strongest hurricanes has not changed, and the mean maximum intensity of all hurricanes has decreased.”

Yes, decreased.

Not only has the intensity of hurricanes fallen, but, as George H. Taylor, the state climatologist of Oregon has pointed out, so has the frequency of hailstorms in the U.S. (see Changnon and Changnon) and cyclones throughout the world (Gulev, et al.).

But environmental extremists do not want to be bothered with the facts. Nor do they wish to mourn the destruction and death wreaked on a glorious city. To their everlasting shame, they would rather distort and exploit.

Related:
Bobby Kennedy Jr. suffers from the same distorting disease. Bobby is not reading the NYT any more, and if he is, he’s not getting it.

Mark in Mexico has an excellent inventory of much of the political silliness assigning blame for the Hurricane.

Cross posted from Civitatensis

When Terror Needs no Weapons

More than 700 civilians are dead in Iraq. Not a bomb exploded, not a shot was fired. We have almost become used to high civilian death tolls reported as a consequence of explosions. But this incident, being billed as the highest single loss of life in Iraq since March 2003, was triggered by wide spreading panic among Shi’ite worshippers, running for cover when rumours travelled among the crowd that there was a suicide bomber in the procession. The mob may have been primed by mortar attacks hours earlier. Many people plunged nine metres from a bridge into the Tigris river, or died trampled by the rushing crowd trying to escape. “Most of the dead were women and children.”

Crushing mobs have killed before. It has happened among pilgrims in Saudi Arabia during Ramadan, or among Rock concert goers in Seattle or in Ohio at a The Who concert in 1979. From my limited experience and readings about crowd behaviour, in such instances, people try to run away from a single focal point identified as the threat. But if people think that there is a suicide bomber about to detonate among them, the chaos must be many times greater. Anyone standing next to you could be the killer; there is no place to feel safe until you find yourself well away from the mob, and so the rushing sense to get away must be that much greater. It must have quickly become a multi-focal chain reaction, moving in all directions, having every mouth rumouring the bomber as an epicentre. The scale of death stands as evidence of the magnitude of the chaos it must have been.

The tragedy is a sad but real reminder that terrorism also kills, and in very large numbers, by exploiting people’s fears of violent death without having to smuggle explosives or weapons into a crowd. Whether the rumour of a suicide bomber in the crowd was set off accidentally or was planted by insurgents, the insurgency will draw lessons from it (You can see why authorities don’t like talk about bombs in airports and airplanes). My guess would be that the insurgents will again try to use the murdering effectiveness of a panicking crowd against itself. Hopefully, Iraqi authorities will learn from it too, but in a land of rumours and of large worshipping crowds it won’t be easy.

Cross posted from Civitatensis

Why plunder Alberta? What’s wrong with B.C.?

Liberals love to chime in that Alberta’s current enviable financial situation is attributable to nothing more than the fact that oil lurks underneath our soil. It helps to justify the inverse situations for Alberta and Ontario, the latter’s election of drunken sailors as guardians of the public purse to the contrary notwithstanding.

Which is why B.C. provides a little problem. A few short years ago, B.C. was a picturesque product of nearly a decade of socialist governance: an economic nightmare and wasteland. Now, under the direction of a fiscally-prudent government, things have turned around:

The province with the next-highest surplus [after Alberta's] is British Columbia with $220 million forecast in its most recent budget. Ontario’s financial outlook, with a deficit forecast of $2.8 billion, is the exact opposite of Alberta’s.

So how do Ontarians explain their failure relative to B.C.’s success? There’s not too much oil in B.C.. Let me guess: B.C. has lots of fish and trees! Any idiot could produce a surplus out of such a treasure of natural resources. Will B.C.’s salmon surplus become the next elephant in the room in inter-provincial meetings?

So why is Ottawa targetting Alberta but not B.C.? Oh right, that’s why:

Mr. Herle also said there is a “paradigm shift” in British Columbia, and said, “B.C. could move to us,” according to one source.

The Liberals have eight of 36 seats in that province, but always show strength between elections. The party never seems to be able to convert that strength to seats on election day.

Progressive Canadian Compassion

What are Progressive Canadians all about? Look no further then Canadan Cynic, a member of the Progressive Bloggers and a master of the art of typing with one hand while keeping the other hand in a bag of cheezies, and his views on Hurricane Katrina:

1. New Orleans is sinking man and I don’t want to swim.
   
2. 
   Apparently, God is really pissed with red states these days.
3. Is the Gulf Coast in for a pounding? By all accounts, you bet. But at least its citizens had the freedom to, way ahead of time, jump in their gaz-guzzling land yachts and head for higher/dryer ground, unlike the citizens of, say, Fallujah in Iraq
4. So I’m just not wasting any more sympathy. If the Americans want help, let them pray for it.
5. I’m assuming that all those soon-to-be homeless, impoverished, uninsured residents of the Gulf Coast can take solace in the fact that, no matter how bad off they are, gays still can’t get married.
6. Sure, we’ll contribute $100 million to the effort. Now you owe us only $4.9 billion. Deal?

The response of the more respectable Progressive Bloggers? Outright support and a weak-kneed inability to deal with lunatics in their midst.

So, you know when some self-righteous Canadian nationalist begins his Michael Moore schtick and prefaces his maniacal critique of George Bush with, “Now, I have nothing against the American people…” Yeah, well that’s horseshit. Envy of the U.S. has become so extreme on the part of Canadian progressives that they now rejoice in the suffering of Americans at the hands of a natural disaster. Those who are too spineless to do so themselves encourage others to do so. If innocent American citizens and their families are killed, that’s retribution for American foreign policy which Progressive Canadians disagree with. If innocent Americans lose their houses and all their worldly possessions, that’s just retribution for the U.S. position in our disagreement on interpretations of NAFTA.

Canada is such an embarrassing country sometimes.

Promosexual Tom

Tom Courchene, the equalization expert who is now advocating the confiscation of Alberta’s wealth in order to soften the consequences of the idiotic fiscal policies of other provincial government and, of course, the federal government, is a difficult man to describe. But I believe I’ve found a way to do so: If there were an intellectual Ed the Sock, he would call Courchene a flaming promosexual. Read Courchene’s describe his own selfless motivations for diving into the debate and tell me that it doesn’t have Lyndsay Lohan all over it:

“This is the beginning of a ‘let those eastern bastards freeze in hell’ type of scenario,” he [Courchene] said. “I guess someone has to say it.”

And that someone is old reliable Tom, fiercely going where he is sure to attract the wrath of Albertan red-necks everywhere. What courage.

I anxiously await the release of Tom’s whole paper. It will make for interesting reading. Because the problem with Ol’ Tom is that of all “public intellectuals,” a phrase the media has dusted off in order to describe Michael Ignatieff. Tom is a smart guy, but the few hints of publicity he receieved in the past prompted him to shift his priorities oh-so-slightly toward public consumption. It’s easy to garner publicity, after all, when you’re controversial. But much more difficult to support one’s assertions.

Does anyone think it is a coincidence that Tom’s paper was released for a full airing in the national media (how many academic papers get that kind of treatment?) a few weeks after Leon Craig’s Alberta separatism manifesto appeared in print and the poll on western separatist was released? How convienent that Tom’s paper coincides with Dalton McGuinty’s new campaign to wrest more money from Albertans to subsidize his irresponsible governance. Suprise suprise.

Central Canada’s Politics Offensive to Alberta, and other Westerners

Dave Rutherford, Calgary talk radio host, made the following observation on the tokenism of the Liberal approach to Western Canada, and the things that divide Western and Central Canada:

“Just having the caucus meeting in Regina is not going to do it. It’s tokenism, and frankly that’s embarrassing,” David Rutherford said, appearing on Question Period.

He says there is a “general anxiety” about the fact that Quebec “has undue influence in the politics of the nation,” he said.

Another concern, he says, is “the population imbalance, of course ,which gives Toronto and the GTA a tremendous balance in voting power.”

Rutherford believes alienation may be alleviated by “an understanding of this part of the world.”

One of the outstanding concerns that western Canadians feel has gone unaddressed is gun control, he said.

“Gun control in and of itself is a Toronto-generated hysteria that cost us $2 billion and didn’t save anybody’s life, but it did persecute a lot of western people who have a lifestyle that includes rifles and shotguns,” he said.

With a federal election approaching as early as the beginning of next year, such issues may return to the forefront.

“If there’s another Liberal minority or Liberal majority government (after the next election,) look out, you’re going to hear a lot from Alberta,” Rutherford said.

The story is carried by CTV News, here. His comments speak to the previous posts on Alberta and Ontario, and on Canada’s gun control laws. Overall, they point to how discussion of separation or alienation revolves not simply around a lack of influence, or Westerners not having much sway in Ottawa, but of Western Canada, particularly Alberta, being outright offended by the politics of Central Canada.

Save Canada: Plunder Alberta.

Twenty-one years ago this summer, I was held up at gun point in a parking lot on Crescent Street in Montreal. A man pointed a .38 at me and said: “Toé, mon petit riche, il faut partager la richesse (You, little rich one, you must share the wealth).” By the robber’s judgement that night, I was rich, richer than he perceived himself to be, so gun in hand he would force me to share the “wealth” he imagined I possessed. He was, in a sense, an equalization expert outside the law. This morning, as I read the headline in the National Post (Klein must share: expert –Country will be in danger if Alberta keeps riches), I experienced a similar feeling than I had when I was being robbed that Montreal summer evening. Like the Montreal thug who held me up, a so-called expert on equalization from Ontario’s Queen’s University and working for Montreal’s Institute for Research in Public Policy, Thomas Courchene, has declared that Alberta SHOULD share its energy wealth. (Update: The story also appears in the Edmonton Journal).

Courchene said [that Alberta's] continued financial growth would prompt Canadians to flock to Alberta, weakening all the other provinces in the process.

This line and much of Courchene’s thinking carry several assumptions that are worth exposing. The above assumes that Canadians coming to Alberta would produce some sort of irreversible evil to the country. Yet, when Atlantic Canadians flock to Central Canada, no one argues that the Central Canadian economy should be pillaged and plundered in order to avert that reality. The Charter-granted mobility of the Canadian worker is only to be decried if working Canadians are moving to Alberta.

Who’s about to live in Saskatchewan…? You could just go to Alberta and be unemployed and probably get welfare that’s a bit more than you could earn in Saskatchewan.

Courchene paints here the picture of an army of welfare entrepreneurs crashing the gates of Alberta. It may happen. But if that were to be the case, all other provinces would welcome the scenario. For every welfare recipient gone to Alberta, there would be one less in Saskatchewan or Ontario. How would that be bad for those provinces? But Courchene statement hides his real intentions behind the appearance of protecting welfare recipients in Saskatchewan. He is patronizingly concerned with hard-working, enterprising Central Canadians moving to Alberta, which clearly would leave Ontario at a disadvantage.

A trend of massive migrations from Quebec and Ontario to Alberta would necessarily –in the long run– alter the demographic make up of Canada. It means that the number of voters in Alberta would increase at the expense of Central Canada. It’s not about protecting welfare recipients and the unemployed. This is as much about a brain drain benefitting Alberta as it is about future seats in the House of Commons; it’s about political power.

The real difficulty that Canada faces is that if Alberta starts spending [its wealth] on infrastructure [sic]. It can have a health system, an education system, an environmental –anything it wants– that no other province can afford. If that happens, the confederation [sic] is gone.”

The would-be theft is disguised as a moral imperative to save Canada. But it assumes that Canada means Central Canada. The successes of Alberta must be curtailed for Central Canada’s sake, as though Alberta were not part of Canada. It’s as it has been. To the Central Canadian elites, the good of Central Canada is the “good of the country.” What Courchene is in fact advocating is another National Energy Policy (NEP), though he lacks the fortitude to call it so. Peter Lougheed, who battled the Trudeauite Liberals of the NEP in the 1970s, warns in the Calgary Herald this morning, they will use euphemisms like “balancing measures.” We all know that they are coming.

Furthermore, Courchene assumes that Albertans are undeserving of their energy wealth. Why would a bunch of knuckle-dragging cattle ranchers and farmers be so fortunate? Surely, the Queen’s/UofT/York-educated Central Canadian elites would put Alberta’s wealth to better use. Great Canadians will make things happen. The position is also patronizing to hard-working Ontarians willing to move to Alberta. It suggests that they’d be better off under the leadership of a province that is close to turning it into a have-not society rather than coming to one that has excelled through innovation, hard-work and good fortune. It belittles Central Canadians who want better as much as it belittles Alberta’s achievements and the sacrifices Albertans have made to clean up their fiscal house.

To many Canadians, Alberta’s wealth has become an intolerable wrong which must be rectified. Courchene’s logic springs from that sentiment and is deceivingly simple: “I don’t think Ottawa can tolerate [Alberta's] $7 billion [surplus] a year.” A strong Alberta is detrimental to Canada, he suggests. As Courchene argues that Alberta’s strength will weaken other provinces, and therefore the country, he is implying that weakening Alberta will strengthen the other (Central Canadian) provinces, and therefore strengthen Canada.

Provinces, like most of us, have no insurance against thugs ambushing us in parking lots. With the sophistication of Ottawa-made law instead of a .38 handgun, Courchene is prepared to dispossess us of some of our collective wealth in contravention of established constitutional jurisdictions, all under the guise of saving the country. Envy is a powerful motivator of men, and it is soon becoming the accepted wisdom. “The pressures on the rest of the country [meaning Ottawa politicians] will be too hard [to resist],” Courchene says.

Pillage Alberta’s wealth to save Canada. The message is clear.

Cross posted from Civitatensis

Irresponsible Gun Control in Canada

A story in the National Post today caught my attention: here. Unfortunately, violent gun crime in the Toronto area is on the rise, and as today’s article tells, resulted in the brutal killing of a “good neighbour” with a social conscience, so to speak. Once again, however, those in authority and responsible for reigning in gun violence fail to rightfully point the finger for this age old crime — hmmm, murder — at the one responsible for it. Once again, paternal government fails to see that guns do not commit crimes, people do; that if you are looking for the root causes of gun violence, start with the responsibility of those who commit it. The means that are used to carry out a crime are always secondary.

People are responsible for the crimes that they commit, and as some have said, it is what makes one fully human. If liberal democratic government is to serve any purpose, it should be to maintain the dignity of mankind by making individuals responsible for the choices they make. All can look to the good neighbour, tragically slain, and see it for the tragedy that it is because his community, his family, has lost a great force for good. But like wise, all can see in his killer, the tragedy of one overtaken by evil, consumed by himself, a wilful murderer. And furthermore, might I propose that a society that fails to make this distinction, is a doomed society; doomed to further increases in gun violence with worse to come.

A good article on Canada’s reaction to increasing gun violence — the blame guns, thereby, blame America response — was offered by John Lott of National Review Online. Lott writes,

If you have a problem, it’s often easier to blame someone else rather than deal with it. And with Canada’s murder rate rising 12 percent last year and a recent rash of murders by gangs in Toronto and other cities, it’s understandable that Canadian politicians want a scapegoat. That at least was the strategy Canada’s premiers took when they met last Thursday with the new U.S. ambassador to Canada, David Wilkins, and spent much of their time blaming their crime problems on guns smuggled in from the United States.

Of course, there is a minor problem with the attacks on the U.S. Canadians really don’t know what the facts are, and the reason is simple: Despite billions of dollars spent on the Canada’s gun-registration program and the program’s inability to solve crime, the government does not how many crime-guns were seized in Canada, let alone where those guns came from. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police reported in late July that they “cannot know if [the guns] were traceable or where they might have been traced.” Thus, even if smuggled guns were an important problem, the Canadian government doesn’t know if it is worse now than in the past.

Even in Toronto, which keeps loose track of these numbers, Paul Culver, a senior Toronto Crown Attorney, claims that guns from the U.S. are a “small part” of the problem.

There is another more serious difficulty: You don’t have to live next to the United States to see how hard it is to stop criminals from getting guns. The easy part is getting law-abiding citizens to disarm; the hard part is getting the guns from criminals. Drug gangs that are firing guns in places like Toronto seem to have little trouble getting the drugs that they sell and it should not be surprising that they can get the weapons they need as well.

The experiences in the U.K. and Australia, two island nations whose borders are much easier to monitor, should also give Canadian gun controllers some pause. The British government banned handguns in 1997 but recently reported that gun crime in England and Wales nearly doubled in the four years from 1998-99 to 2002-03.
…
With Canada’s reported violent-crime rate of 963 per 100,000 in 2003, a rate about twice the U.S.’s (which is 475), Canada’s politicians are understandably nervous.

Lott spends the rest of this article making the argument that because the U.S. has “liberalised” gun laws, America is now experiencing a record fall in violent crime, while countries with stringent — what I would call, “paternal” — gun laws are experiencing record increases in violent crime.

His argument makes sense on common sense grounds. People know they have a free will, they know they are responsible for the choices they make, good or bad. When government tells people the lie that something else is also responsible for their crime — i.e. positive exposure to guns as a child, the possession of a gun itself — and that more government is needed to solve this grandiose first cause, many start to believe it—those with common sense do not. But it is this “many”, those who want to believe that something magical is to blame for human error, that now facilitate greater evil; or in this case, an increase in gun violence. Innocent suckers fail to demand the means to protect themselves and those they care for, more liberal and legal gun access. Violent suckers are fully aware of this, coming to see guns as further distinguishing themselves from everyone else—especially, their victims. With paternal government and stringent gun laws, it is harder for law abiding citizens to get guns and criminals have more incentive to possess them in their “rage against the machine” than ever before. And might I add, the illegal smuggling of guns becomes more lucrative and wide-spread as government clamps down.

In short, the gun becomes something special, a mark of authority that only criminals and police possess. Communities, by and large, lack the supposed respectability that comes with gun possession, they are but pawns to be intimidated with crime or patted on the head for their good behaviour. Society is no longer responsible for the crime corroding its very structure and stability, the lie is peddled that responsibility lay with an unthinking material object. Government becomes the only response of society towards crime, the criminals a privileged class in rebellion to it.

If the said “good neighbour” was motivated by anything, it was the belief that ordinary people can take a stand in their communities and make a difference. The failure of government to see that this is where good government starts — individual responsibility rather than from what politicians say and their objectifiable scapegoats — leads to the success of criminals in seeing communities as indeed defenseless pawns to be manipulated, to an increase in violence crime.

Might I suggest that “good neighbours” need street cred with criminals, in this case, guns!

Idiot Digest, Vol. 1 Issue. 1

Werner Patels reflects upon yesterday’s slew of stories and responses to the news that Ontario and Ottawa are eyeing up Alberta’s oil revenues by claiming that we should be grateful for the attention, which can only help to ease western alienation:

“If Vitor is a true-blooded Albertan, as he claims, he should be grateful for the attention. After all, people like him always bellyache about how “alienated” they feel out here in the West.”

I like attention as much as the next guy, but tend to shy away from the “steal your resources, destroy your economy” type of attention.

I suppose that this makes sense if one views Alberta, as Werner apparently does, as a spoilt child, as grateful for negative as for positive attention. But the expressed view that Alberta is a spoilt child who should be grateful for the attention of Ontario and Ottawa will be an…entertaining one when, as Werner claims, he runs as a Liberal candidate in Calgary. Nothing could be more indicative that Liberals in Alberta are becoming an uncompetitive laugh-track party then their attraction of kooks like this as candidates.

Albertans: Tell Your Story to the World

J. Franklin, a regular contributor to ThePolitic.com, reports on the “Alberta Story” at the world-famous Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC.:

“It’s to tell the Alberta story essentially,â€? explained Al Chapman, the Alberta government’s project manager for the Smithsonian Institutes Folklife Festival, which runs from June 30 to July 11, 2006.
He and Dr. Nancy Groce, the curator of the exhibit, have travelled extensively throughout Alberta to find the right people. They are looking for 120 individuals, who are Alberta’s finest musicians, storytellers, cooks, craftspeople, occupational specialists and cultural experts to share the Alberta experience through performances, demonstrations and educational programs.

Franklin has some relevant suggestions for stories to tell the Smithsonian. You can click here (and here) to tell them yours.

Crossposted to Civitatensis.

Next Page »