Supreme Court Nominee, Kagan on the First Amendment

US Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, argues it’s fine if the law bans books because government won’t bother to enforce the law:

Michael Den Tandt, clueless about globalization

In his editorial today, Michael Den Tandt demonstrates his ignorance of his fellow man as it relates to basic economics by printing this mindless tripe:

Anyone who bothers to crack an economics text will know that globalization and free trade have lifted more human beings out of poverty than any other idea in history.

The reason is that trade creates wealth and jobs. Jobs allow people to feed their families and buy extras, produced by other people, which in turn employs those people. And on it goes.

I invite him to read my blog post: Everything we ignore about Free Trade which explains the falsehood of his economic faith. However, since he has demonstrated publicly his ignorance in economic principles, I will now summarize his ignorant mistake: He does not know whether the people in third world countries are freely choosing to participate in trade.

Michael Den Tandt should be blogging instead of wasting printed paper.

The socialism of security — Military, Policing, Justice, Law and Order

It never ceases to amaze me how vulgar conservatives are blind to their own innate socialism. The markets for security, military, defense, policing, justice, law or order are wonderful examples that demonstrate this peculiar cognitive dissonance among them. The vast majority of self-proclaimed conservatives will live their entire lives and die without ever recognizing that they reflexively assume that statesmen should monopolize these services.

Try to get that same conservative to endorse the monopolization of any other service and he will refuse.

part of the series “The Subconscious of a Conservative”

Accommodating Honour Murder

With Aqsa Parvez finally resting peacefully, her murderers — her very own father and brother — sentenced to the Canadian-style “life in prison” with no chance of parole for 18 years, it’s time for the religious equivalence and multiculturalist types to step forward again and declare that “honour killing,” which I more accurately define as honour murder, is not just Islam’s problem.

Ujjal Dosanjh, Liberal MP – it’s the bloody patriarchy, stupid!

There is a huge misconception that these crimes occur because of certain religious beliefs. There is no religion that condones the murder of women. It’s the feudal/patriarchal culture of male dominance and control that’s the culprit.

Dr. Amin Muhammad, Professor of Psychiatry at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador – it’s not just Islam, stupid!

While many recent cases in Western society involve Muslims, Dr. Muhammad said honour killings have also been committed in the name of Hinduism, Sikhism and Christianity.

To which I say: While it may be true that “honour killings have also been committed in the name of Hinduism, Sikhism and Christianity,” the numbers pale in comparison to the thousands of females murdered each year around the world in the name of Islam for the sake of family honour.

United Nations Population Fund:

Throughout the world, perhaps as many as 5,000 women and girls a year are murdered by members of their own families, many of them for the “dishonour” of having been raped, often as not by a member of their own extended family.

It is dishonest at best to survey the numbers of honour murders committed by Muslims, along with the allowances for honour murder within the legal structures of Islamic nations, such as Syria, Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan, which can be seen as a tacit endorsement of the practice, and then suggest equivalency among faiths when a handful of honour murders are committed by members of other faiths. Honour murder is a much greater problem for Islam than it is for other faiths and it is ludicrous to even suggest otherwise.

As for endorsement within religious texts, Dosanjh and Muhammed are correct that no religion condones honour murder per se, but they should have been more careful to point out the caveats under Islam that have led to the widespread acceptance of honour murder within Islamic tradition. As an example, Christianity, the faith I know best, provides no justification whatsoever to murder one’s own children or one’s wife, whereas the Qur’an Sura 18 arguably allows for the killing of children not even your own as long as you’ve accurately determined a child will grow up as a non-believer. (How that determination is made, I have no clue.)

Does honour murder occur in other faiths? Yes. Under which faith is it most prevalent, by far? Islam. Which nations tacitly endorse the practice through caveats of law? Islamic nations. That’s the point that must be accepted before reform can be realized, and it’s the critical point that Dosanjh and others prefer to gloss over to our collective detriment.

I credit Dosanjh in one respect, though; his reference to the role political correctness in shaping the response to honour murder.

… political correctness prevents us from demanding that the cultural norms that justify such heinous practices as honour killings have no place anywhere in the world. We must never be too sensitive to call a spade a spade.

As if on cue, some on the pro-dhimmi side are already suggesting Canadian judges should take “cultural practices,” such as honour killing, into consideration out of respect for (I say genuflection at the altar of) multiculturalism. Scaramouche, via Mark Steyn:

John Oakley is seriously entertaining the question of whether Canadian judges should give those who commit “honour” killings a break because they have different “cultural practices” and may not be aware of our norms and laws; defence attorney Lawrence Ben-Eliezer thinks judges should  take these differences into consideration because we have “multiculturalism”.

Canadians, of course, are already aware of what “taking these differences into consideration” means: preferential treatment of en vogue “victim” groups of the political left. What Canadians are less aware of, in my opinion, is the tangible threat posed to Western society by ardent multiculturalism, our Achilles heel.

Contempt for Parliament from Thee but not from Me

I don’t have much use for any of the political parties right now.  I’m rather ticked off with both the Liberals and the Conservatives, but it’s the NDP who have particularly irked me the past few days.

I don’t have an issue with them refusing to buy in to the agreement on the release of documents relating to the detainee scandal.  I’m willing to believe that’s a principled opposition stance… I’m inclined to think it’s more partisan gamesmanship, but I can give them the benefit of the doubt.  The NDP certainly have reasonable cause for concern.  We have a government that has been trying to keep the entire matter quiet.  If I was in opposition, I’d be wary that they’re suddenly willing to have an open investigation.

Their decision spawned some typical partisan sniping:

[Liberal house leader Ralph Goodale] also suggested that the NDP’s decision to back away from the deal came as no surprise “because they just didn’t seem to be engaged in the reality and the substance that was involved here.”

Whether they were fully engaged or not doesn’t really absolve the other parties for behaving like children.  Anyway, it’s Ottawa, and a little childishness is to be expected.  Regardless, any sympathy I had for the NDP disappeared in but a few days.

“We’ve got to make sure that Karla Homolka doesn’t get a pardon and we want to work with the government to find a way to make sure that happens,” NDP Leader Jack Layton said.

I guess a principled stance is only worthwhile as long as it doesn’t preclude them from getting their vitriol on.  As the above quotation demonstrates, the NDP (unwilling to bend on the document issue) will sign on to whatever vengeful policy the Conservatives bring forward – no matter how ill-conceived such a manoeuvre – as long as it allows them to enforce their particular version of justice.

The Conservative party were found in contempt of parliament for their handling of the Afghan detainee file.  The NDP has shown that they don’t have much more respect for the parliamentary process.  So, dear NDP, the next time a principled stance is assumed to be political opportunism, this is why.

Maxime Bernier: The Conservative Party’s Last Hope?

No, I’m not asking if he’s the only one who can save the Conservative Party; I’m asking if he has the potential to end all hope for the party.

The scuttlebutt is that Mr. Bernier is angling to take a run at the Conservative leadership.   Recently, he has made some high profile speeches laying out potential economic policies.  He spoke about freezing public spending, and then eliminating corporate taxes.  So far, so good.

Then, writing in National Post on Tuesday, Maxime Bernier admitted that he has gold fever:

I believe that within a few years, we will need to hold a serious debate about returning to the gold standard.

His article is titled, ‘Inflation should be 0%’.  It’s a mish-mash of folksie (non-)wisdom and economic illiteracy.  He begins by arguing for 0% inflation, moves to supporting deflation, and backs it all up by noting that computers have dropped in price but people still by them.

Seriously:

In fact, there is nothing mysterious about the effects of lower prices. Think about computers. Fifteen years ago, they were big, not very powerful, had few gadgets, and cost a lot more than today. Prices in the computer business have been going down all the time since then.

Have people stopped buying computers or waited years before buying a new one to benefit from even lower prices? Absolutely not. On the contrary, more computers are being sold as their prices go down.

I really don’t know where to begin.  He makes no actual arguments in favour of deflation, he just makes a lot of assertions claiming that we’ll all be able to more stuff with the same amount of money.  There’s no indication as to how an expanding economy would function with a static money supply.  There’s also no reasoning to support the notion that gold has some eternal quality that makes it the perfect support for currency.

I just can’t imagine this person leading a major national party.  Under his lead, the future of the CPC would be less secure than classified documents left at an ex-girlfriend’s house.

I have some more thoughts on his antiquated stance here.

Sobering Question

Dennis Prager:

The reason mankind has to hope that the world, its leaders, its newspapers, its so-called human-rights organizations, and the United Nations are right about Israel is quite simple: If Israel is the decent party in its war with the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, and nearly all the world’s countries, nearly all the world’s media, and the United Nations are morally wrong, what hope is there for humanity? If the world’s moral compass is that broken, are we not sailing into a dark age?

Flotilla babies

(Welcome SDA readers. Be sure to digest the final link, particularly if you’re Canadian. -MP)

The MSM and blogs lit up yesterday over the “Jenin on the high seas,” as Jonathan Kay so aptly put it. Today, another prime morsel from CBC:

Turkish woman Nilufer Cetin said she agreed to be extradited from Israel after being warned jail conditions in Be’er Sheva would be “too harsh” for her one-year-old baby, whom she’d brought on the voyage. (Emphasis mine.)

Now, there are a whole slew of possible reasons why Ms. Cetin brought along her one-year-old.

Perhaps she didn’t trust her day care provider(s) to give better care for her child than she could give on flotilla bound for Gaza in spite of numerous serious warnings that the passage would not occur.

Perhaps the father of the child is an “activist” in Gaza and this was an excellent opportunity to let him see his son for the first time.

Perhaps the father of the child is an “activist” in Turkey who fondly dreams of his entire family becoming martyrs in the global jihad against the Great Satan and the Evil Jooos. (And who could pass up the opportunity to shmooze with a few Islamic nutbar big-wigs?)

Perhaps she thought she was on a tour of the Mediterranean and would simply be passing by Gaza on a $50 sightseeing, pictures-from-the-boat excursion instead of plowing full-on into Israeli forces.

But perhaps, just perhaps, she knew full well the dangers, presumed violence would occur and, like her “activist” Arabs brothers and sisters in Gaza and the West Bank, decided to put the child between herself and the evil Jooos and presume upon the moral integrity of the Israeli soldiers who would be getting a drubbing at the hands of her colleagues or thrown 30 feet between decks of the vessel.

The most logical explanation of how this one-year-old ended up on one of those vessels: human shield.

Update: 100 or more of the “activists” are jihadists and were recruited by “the same IHH handler who organized the flotilla.” One wonders if said IHH handler also encouraged Ms. Cetin to bring her child.

Update+: You can’t make this up. Ties to a Montreal terrorist cell.

The day before Israeli commandos stormed the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish ship leading a blockade-busting mission to Gaza, passengers were chanting an Islamic battle cry and singing songs reminiscent of the Palestinian Intifada.

One woman aboard the ship told an Al-Jazeera reporter the goal was “one of two happy endings: either martyrdom or reaching Gaza.” [...]

The latest flotilla was organized by the Free Gaza Movement and IHH, a Turkish humanitarian organization that has also been linked to weapons trafficking and a Montreal terrorist cell.

Update ++: Your must read for today — Peter Hitchens, “The Joys of Selective Outrage.” He’s better at the media game than his notorious brother. Some scrumptious bits:

The interesting thing is that [Modern Leftism's] outrage is so selective and inconsistent. This has long been so, and arises from the fact that the Left still hasn’t worked out how to replace the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount, and so makes its ideas of good and evil up as it goes along. [...]

Another of my favourite Leftist inconsistencies is the tangle they get themselves in over Islam and Israel. In their universe Islam is good where it challenges the conservative Christian monoculture of Britain and the USA. Islam is bad when it denounces homosexuality and demands the veiling of women, and generally opposes the sexual revolution which is the main concern and aim of the modern left. Islam is good when it pursues its unrelenting war against Israel. It’s bad when, in the mythical form of ‘Al Qaeda’ or the more tangible form of the Taliban, it ‘hates our way of life’ and opposes the education of women, etc etc.

Islam’s attack on Israel (in the Islamic world) often takes rather unpleasant forms. Muslim clerics say things there that would get them drummed out of civilised society here. But Israel is the country everyone in Europe loves to hate – while making it clear that this loathing has nothing, nothing at all, to do with the fact that Israel is a Jewish state. Good heavens no. The very idea. How could you even think such a thing? Anti-Semite? Me? Etc etc. Well, no doubt these protestations are true, which is why I try to popularise the word ‘Judophobic’ instead. Call someone an anti-Semite and he will instantly and huffily say that he’s of course not Adolf Eichmann or that bad man in ‘Schindler’s List’. So he can’t be against Jews, let alone an anti-Semite. The very idea.