Is Oz Becoming an Online Police State?

I don't really talk about the politics of other nations that often beyond the Americas. However, I can't help but find myself asking what the heck is going on with Australia. In 2007, the centre right Liberal Party of Australia was replaced with the left wing social democratic Labour Party. Since Kevin Rudd was elected Prime Minister, the country has started taking a disturbingly authoritarian turn. I've been closely following the continuing saga on Internet censorship within the country. For years, conservatives have been warning people about the dangers of left wing nanny statism. Banning smoking in cars with kids, or banning pesticides and coffee cups to keep people politically correct might seem pretty harmless but it is, to use an oft complained about term, a slippery slope. Australia has been doing what many other left leaning democracies in the west have been regarding the Internet. The basic idea was to enact a law and bureaucratic body which would blacklist websites dealing in child pornography. Internet service providers would be required to block these sites or face a fine. Those linking to those sites would also face an $11,000 fine. The concept is noble enough and I don't dispute that child pornography on the web is a vary serious issue. However, problems occur when there are no checks placed on the bureaucracy in control of what should and should not be censored. The biggest danger is when governments keep information on what is censored censored. This is the case within countries such as Australia and Denmark.

Whistle blower website Wikileaks had obtained a copy of a censored web sites list being used by the Danish government. The site soon found itself blocked by Australia. The same site managed to obtain a copy of Australia's secret list of blocked sites. On it included an American anti-abortion website as well as the innocent websites of a dentist and a tuckshop owner. Online gambling sites, Youtube links, Wikipedia entries, sites on euthanasia, legal pornography, fringe religions, fetishes, Christianity, and that of a tour operator were also blacklisted. The Australian government claims that the list is not genuine. However, media investigations seem to indicate otherwise. Reports have also come out regarding the censorship of adult content on the Internet (R and X rated) to protect children. I took a quick look through the list and discovered several legitimate porn and gambling sites including Milkmanbook (legal erotic art) and Pokerstars. This is the vary slippery slope I talked about. A tool originally just intended to filter out child porn websites is being cast wider to get rid of things the government does not approve of. Right now it may seem alright to get rid of what are widely considered social vices such as gambling and legal porn but the blocking of the anti-abortion website and particularly of Wikileaks is cause for great concern. Wikileaks has been highly critical of the Great Firewall of Australia.

Currently, most of what is on the list legitimately deserves to be there, but how far is it until the government starts manipulating bureaucrats into blocking website belonging to their critics and political opposition. This would make Australia no better than the People's Republic of China or Chavez's Venezuela. Simply put, these blacklists don't work because they are too easy to abuse. The great danger to us Canadians is that a similar firewall could easily be implemented here. Once we start restricting people from certain types of information, and more importantly restricting people from knowing what is restricted, we loose our democracy; even if the original intention was to protect the greater good.

You can visit Wikileaks for more information on this issue, including the list. I warn you not to view any of the links it contains. UK based technology site The Register has also been following the story closely.

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David Dodge Living in a Technicolor Dream World

This says it all. Just going to do a direct copy & paste this story. The statistics don't support what people like Buffet and Dodge are saying.

OTTAWA — Retail sales in Canada rose unexpectedly in January by 1.9 per cent to $33.7 billion after three months of declines thanks largely to a rise in the auto sector, Statistics Canada reported Friday.

Automobiles sales jumped 6.4 per cent in January following a 15.1 per cent decline the month before, the federal agency reported.

Analysts polled by Bloomberg had been calling for a one per cent rise in retail sales.

The gain in January reverses a 5.2 per cent slide in December, the largest monthly drop in more than 15 years and the third consecutive month of declines.

Source: Canada.com

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Seeking Peace: Musings on the Environment, Places to Grow and Urban Sprawl

I've spent a lot of time here taking pot shots at the environmental movement and I still stand firmly by everything I've said in the past. Global warming is a constructed phony disaster in my mind and I think it distracts people from more important issues, both in general and regarding our environment. Governments are more interested in how they can make money of "climate change" and mostly make token gestures, such as banning pesticides and bottled water, which does nothing more than to irk ordinary people. One of the most painful things about growing up and growing older is seeing a lot of the things you treasured as a child melt away. Long walks on peaceful summer days, nothing but the sound of a light breeze, robins singing, and distant wind chimes. Sitting by the pond or lying in the grass watching the world lazily go by in a small town. Trips to the lake, playing in the park, long bike rides; all things that make young lives worth living. I sometimes wonder whether this stuff will be around for future generations to enjoy. As it stands now, much of this is already gone. Startlingly, this has only happened in perhaps the last 10 years. Urban sprawl is probably one of the biggest threats to the environment, or at least the biggest threat that effects us directly.

So here we've come full circle to where we began nearly four years ago when I first started this blog. It was the same year that the Places to Grow Act went into force. The law passed by the McGuinty Government combined with the Green Belt act originally sought to increase urban density while protecting outlying areas and the countryside. The reality of the act has become painfully apparent as it has only encouraged massive urban sprawl, destroying the countryside and ruining small, outlying communities in the GTA. Quiet summer days have been replaced by the constant beeping of backup alarms from construction vehicles, flying dirt, and endless traffic. Wildlife has fled these communities en mass and those that remain often become pancakes on the road. For me personally, this change has taken a huge toll on my well being as Escarpment Country is turned into another Oakridges Moraine. Even now all I can hear is construction machinery and traffic and I have lost my escarpment view, decreasing my property value and ending the charm the Milton community once had. Houses are now at the base of the Escarpment, which is supposedly part of the Green Belt. The town can barely sustain the population growth, which has more than doubled within the last five years. The problem has largely been caused by large developers who have taken over communities due to naive municipal councilors and workers but it all can be routed back to 2005 and Dalton McGuinty. Here is a man who jumped on the eco-bandwagon early but each plan he and his government have come up with has failed. Oakridges was just the beginning, where in 2003 he promised he would stop development on environmentally sensitive land. It was the first promise he broke.

The laws are impotent when it comes to stopping any kind of development. Even if a munipality manages to vote down a proposal, developers head to the Ontario Municipal Board where their plans get rubber stamped. People who do not know the community are making decisions that effect citizens, without said citizens having any say. Even Toronto is not immune after an unwanted condo development in an old neighbourhood was forced through by the board. The City named the street the condos were on as OMB Folly to take a swipe at the faceless board. Everybody knows OMB members are getting paid off by developers. Everybody knows corruption is ripe in that industry. However, they're vary good at covering their tracks and it's impossible to prove. It's hard to fight this kind of environmental destruction when absolutely nobody is on your side.

There needs to be a complete freeze on development projects until the situation can be properly assessed. The Places to Grow Act also has to be immediately repealed. If McGuinty et al supposedly care about the environment, they'll act to actually do something to protect what we have, rather than just implementing token anti-climate change schemes.

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More Economic Fear Mongering

Ex-Bank of Canada governor David Dodge thinks that anyone who thinks the economy isn't in a deep depression is "living in a technocolour dream world". Where do they find these retards? I've already commented on this topic but I thought the Dodge comments are worth mentioning. Something else struck to me while I was thinking about this today that's so obvious I'm not sure why I didn't think about it before. There's a lot of money to be made from these statements. Spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the economy, stocks go down, buy premium shares cheap, make a fortune when they go back up. No conflict of interest here. I'm sure everybody else has probably figured this out already; I'm a bit slow at times. Then again, I already knew the high rollers were playing these games, this is just a new tactic. The media is a bit slow too for not realizing this or any of the other games being played with our lives. How do you stop this? Government regulation? No, it's time to start exposing these idiots for the idiots that they are.

Anyway, here's the story on CNEWS.

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Is the Economy Really That Bad?

I'm not an economist but I do have to know some things about the economy. I cannot help but wonder if things are really as bad as we're being told. The mortgage industry in the US collapsed and the auto industry has been hit hard, but that's it. Granted, they are vary big but they still don't make up the bulk of GDP in North America by themselves. A lot of the problem businesses out there; notable failures like US electronics chain Circuit City and Canadian telecom firm Nortel have been circling the drain for years. However, every day we keep hearing about companies who were doing just fine just a few months ago now "tightening their belts". Is this really warranted? Are people loosing their jobs needlessly? I say yes. Two things rule the markets: greed and fear. I think a lot of the current crisis is being driven by fear alone rather than actual numbers. There is a reason people used to call economic downturns "panics" before the Great Depression.

The markets are down because people panicked and pulled all their money out, allowing the high rollers to play games with your money, as they still are. Billionaire Warren Buffet has proven that you can be one of the world's richest men but still be a complete and total idiot. Each time he panics and shoots his mouth off, it makes things worse. Of course the bigger dummies are the ones that listen to him. A lot of it is poor management by people with the same mentality as Buffet who are simply too lazy to search for the root causes of their problems and instead just lay people off. The real victims are those who have just left school who cannot find work because these idiots keep playing games over who can get needlessly scared the most. These youths just starting to enter the workforce are not eligible to collect EI and if they can't find jobs, they're essentially screwed. Just stop, this is not another Great Depression, far from it. The economy is not as bad as they keep saying. People are still buying, trade is still going. The truth is, that if you have a job, you have nothing to worry about. This whole recession has been artificially created by fear and it needs to stop.

Now, I'm not a fan of government intervention in the economy but something needs to be done to stop these needless layoffs and to ensure those entering the workforce can obtain work. A solution would be to offer tax incentives to companies who hire, especially those who hire recent highschool and university graduates. If things are tight, there should also be tax incentives offered that encourages employees and employers to adopt programs such as job sharing to ensure people can at the vary least keep working and keep earning an income. While Liberals have balked at how much such incentives would cost, it would save a significant amount of money in the long run by keeping people paying taxes and not collecting EI and welfare. If that fails, governments should consider imposing tax penalties on companies laying off large numbers of non-seasonal workers unless they can prove it is absolutely necessary to ensure the business's survival. It's not a step I would want to take but it may be necessary to stem the panic. Sometimes we all need a little tough love.

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Is the CBC Still Relevant?

The National Post had an article today about troubles at the CBC. I mentioned it in my article on the CRTC. As I noted, it was originally created as a counter to "low brow" American radio content, which during the 1930s was all that was available to Canadians. In fact, up until about the 70s, it was the only truly nation wide network available to the majority of Canadians. However, technology marches on and when it evolves, many get left in the dust, obsolete and destined for obscurity. The change that marked the slow demise for the CBC was the advent of cable and satellite television. Hundreds of stations from all over Canada, the US, and the world were now available to Canadians. Around the same time, Pierre Trudeau gave the CRTC the mandate to control the minimum amount of Canadian content the new mediums had to broadcast. When that happened, the CBC was officially put on life support. The next blow was the growth of Web 2.0, which allowed a previously unimaginable amount Canadian content to be broadcast world wide at very little cost. Thanks to YouTube and better, cheaper camcorders, anybody can make their own TV show or movie and upload it to the Internet. Despite a massive number of Canadians logging on and producing content for the web, the CRTC is mulling over whether it needs to be regulated as part of Trudeau's Canadian content mandate. What is the CRTC protecting though? As they did with cable, satellite TV, and satellite radio, the sole reason for trying to regulate the Internet is, once again, to keep the CBC on life support.

How much trouble is the CBC in anyway. Without even reading into it too much, you can gauge it by just asking ordinary Canadians what they watch on the network. The vast majority will say Hockey Night in Canada, but nothing else. That's not to say the CBC hasn't produced some good shows. Obviously This Hour Has 22 Minutes must have something to it regardless of it's recent gaffes. After all, John Stewart thought it was good enough to rip off. The now cancelled Red Green Show is a cult classic in the US, though it's important to note it started life on Global. Other shows were allowed to go from Canadian classics to downright embarrassments, such as Air Farce. After John Morgan died, the show should have ended. However, the CBC let it keep going to preserve Canadian content, even after it devolved to a half hour of Bush bashing ever Friday, and it's cast ballooned to a whole host of unfunny actors. Shows like jPod were quickly cancelled and nobody stands around the water cooler discussing what happened on Being Erika, Heartland, or Little Mosque on the Prairie. By contrast, both CTV and Global recently scored huge US deals with CBS and NBC to air all-Canadian shows Flashpoint and Howie Do It respectively. If CBC shows do end up shown in the US, it's usually on backwater PBS affiliates. In an ironic twist, the CBC seems to air an awful lot of American content, such as Martha Steward, Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune, and The Simpsons. Irritating British soap Coronation Street also airs on the network.

The debate regarding the relevance of the CBC has been going on for as long as I can remember. The problem is that the network receives tax dollars from the government to fund it. People are upset due to this because it does air American content, while others see the supposedly neutral network as having a pro-Liberal bias. The CBC has now come to describe itself as a government subsidized commercial network. Indeed, that is what it has always been. The CBC was never a public broadcaster. It continued to receive most of it's revenue from advertising, just as all other commercial networks do. It is also the quintessential example of what goes wrong when governments subsidize "critical" private enterprises. Take the Hockey Night in Canada fiasco for example. It's the most popular show by far on the network. Last year, the CBC dumped it's world famous theme song, often jokingly called Canada's second national anthem, because it didn't want to pay $500 in royalties to its composer each time it was played. The cost spent on that probably works out to around $100,000 per year, which is peanuts relatively speaking for such a big organization. Loud mouthed hockey twit Don Cherry makes several times that in salary. Then they ran a contest to find a new theme song, where the winner would get something like $10,000. I'm curious how much they spent on running the contest, because I can guarantee it was a lot more than they were paying to use the Hockey Night theme. What about the money wasted on unpopular shows, such as Air Farce, that ran well past their best before date. This is the same network that gave David Suzuki a job, and a soap box for his eco-fascism, so should we really be surprised by this idiocy? The CBC knows if it screws up, the government will just rescue it. Insert tongue-in-cheek reference to General Motors and Chrysler here.

However, the National Post claims the CBC's national per capita subsidy is actually quite low. Just $33 per person compared to $77 average in France for it's counterpart broadcaster. The BBC by contrast uses a TV licensing scheme. I have always thought this to be unfair though. While the BBC does provide high quality, commerical free programming, I don't like the idea of being forced to pay for services you don't use or approve of. The BBC is hardly the politically unbiased entity it claims to be. Just type "Global Warming" on the BBC News Online search box to find out why. The question still is whether the CBC should get any government funding at all. I say no. The network has outlived it's original purpose and has actually gotten to the point where it has betrayed it. If the CBC is to survive in the digital age without Canadian content intrusion from the CRTC, it needs to start producing higher quality programming that people actually want to watch, not what they think people should watch. CTV has done vary well for itself after recent changes and has proven it can viably go up against the big American networks. Canada should follow a US model when it comes to public TV. The vary same model that networks such as PBS and TVO follow. Privately owned and funded entirely by donations. This model maximizes consumer choice, rather than forcing things nobody wants down people's throats. The CBC is not needed to preserve Canadian content anymore. Right now, most TV networks are deep in the red due to the recession. The CBC is currently at an unfair advantage when it should not be. If the CBC can't survive, innovate, and thrive under this proposed system, then it should be allowed to fail.

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I'd Rather Take the Mercedes

Now here's a classic example of the McGuinty Liberals once again making it seem like they're doing something when they actually aren't. Yesterday, Minister George Smitherman blasted the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation (OLG) for giving away a Mercedes Benz in one of its up coming lotteries. According to Smitherman, with the current downturn in the economy, the lottery should be showcasing Canadian built cars as prizes rather then ones built in Europe. At first this seems to make sense until you realize nobody wants a Chevy. OLG claims the deal was made ten months ago and they're in a contract with Daimler Crysler for the car. That's right, Mercedes is owned by Crysler, one of the two companies looking for a $10 billion bailout from the Feds. At first it seems to make sense and I can't see why OLG couldn't just make a deal to swap the Marcedes for say a fully loader Challenger, which is made in Brampton ON. However, this is really just nitpicking on the Liberals part. It's one $80,000 car that is being given as a prize in one lottery. It's not like OLG is giving out thousands of foreign made cars left, right, and centre on a daily basis. They do offer Canadian built cars in their lotteries as is, as do many other car lotteries in Ontario. This outcry by Smitherman is a political gesture mostly to appease the CAW. "Fake outrage and the idiots will keep voting for us because they think we're on their side."

Switching gears here, no pun intended, I think it's worth while to examine the whole bailout issue. Out of the Big Three US automakers, Ford is the only company that is not seeking a bailout from either the US or Canada. Ford Canada's CEO put an interesting offer on the table. What if instead of a direct bailout, the government increases the scrapping fee for cars over 10 years old to $3500. That would mean that when you trade in your old car, you get $3500 tax rebate towards a new vehicle. Both Honda and Toyota's Canadian divisions are backing Ford on this idea. Ford reasons that there is no sense in giving these companies money if people still are not buying cars. It is currently a vary good time to purchase a new vehicle but with the way the economy is, that little extra nudge may be what's needed to get people to take the plunge. I for one think this is an excellent idea and it's likely one the Conservatives will endorse. Liberals have already started bashing it though, considering it a waste of tax payer dollars. From my experience, Liberals tend to prefer more immediate, short-term results. The problem is that short-term thinking just doesn't work here. You could bail out GM now and maybe save some jobs for a year or two but what happens after? GM has shown little to no interest in meaningful restructuring and the CAW has been highly resistant to concessions. So if you bail them out now, you'll likely have to bail them out again five years down the road. Additionally, you'll still have thousands of vehicles rusting on car lots, not generating revenue. This doesn't create a sustainable economy or job security. With Ford's plan, you're taking the money that you would have spent on the bailout anyway and giving it back to consumers for the explicit purpose of buying a new, Canadian made car. This jump starts market and creates a more sustainable environment to sell new vehicles. Hey, it's the best plan we've heard so far and we've pretty much exhausted all other alternatives. The least we could do is try it rather than throwing more tax dollars down a hole.

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Global Warming: We Hardly Knew Ye

Well, that's it, Anthropogenic Global Warming is officially dead. Well, that's what anybody with half a brain wants to here. Well, it's not completely gone away but the theory has been dealt a major blow in recent months. Fellow Canadian conservative blogger Steven Janke, now writing for the National Post, refers to an article that states global warming has stopped dead in its tracks. According to Discovery News (US equivalent to Daily Planet. Jay Ingram is a huge advocate of the AGW theory incidentally), a new study in Geophysics Research Letters notes that global warming has stopped and that the Earth is actually cooling. Following a 30-year warming trend, global temperatures have remained stable since 2001 despite rising greenhouse gasses and "a heat surplus that should have cranked up the planetary thermostat."

Scientists are suggesting that the Earth may not warm again for another 30 years but are warning people that the temperature may "explode" in the decades following due to our polluting ways. They're calling the three decade pause just a hiccup. Aside from this prediction defying physics, it opens the window into the thought process of the pro-AGW camp. 30 years of warming represents a calamity and a solid, undisputable trend, where as 30 years of cooling is just an anomaly. Give it up people, you were wrong. Just admit it. This is what happens when politics rules over science. You get lots of money shoved in the face of a chic theory and of course people are going to start fudging the data and using inaccurate modeling in order to ensure that money keeps coming. I conservatively estimate that at least half a trillion dollars has been flushed down the drain on global warming in this decade alone. It's ironic that people bawk at spending that kind of money to save their jobs but they don't blink at spending it on a false theory.

Source: National Post

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Racism on the Left Part 2: Antisemitism

Jewish groups around the world are claiming instances of antisemitism are on the rise. Traditionally, this sort of behaviour was restricted to neo-Nazis, skin heads, Ku Klux Klansmen, and other white supremacists. Recently, pro-Jew, pro-Israel has moved to a right wing dominant ideology. Liberals style themselves as being tolerant of other religions and ethnicities yet we've seen an increasing number of attacks against Jews by left wing groups. No more has this been seen than in the halls of university and within labour unions. Currently, many universities in Canada are preparing to hold their Israeli Apartheid Weeks, in an effort to compare Israel's treatment of Palestine to blacks in South Africa. The description is incredibly inaccurate but still holds a powerful symbolism for those who participate in such events. However, such events mask strong underlying antisemitism.

Perhaps the most infamous example in recent years has been at York University. Jewish students often complain of harassment and assault on campus by Muslim and left wing students. It's one thing to oppose what a country does but to demonize its citizens to the point of forcing them to hole up in their student office is a blatant hate crime. However, where are the outcries? Where are the students union and Muslim campus club leaders being hauled in front of the human rights commission? There is an incredable double standard when it comes to hate speech in this country that the left openly endorses. Take Mark Styne for example, a Jew, who was forced in front of the kangaroo courts because some Muslims deemed his work to be offensive to their culture. Eventually he was deemed not guilty of anything yet he still spent years defending himself. We have the same Muslim groups crying from the mosque pulpits and university campuses proclaiming that Israel should not exist and that Hitler was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Nobody does anything. Another example was when Ontario CUPE leader Syd Ryan attempted to black list Jewish-Israeli professors from the province's universities over Israels Gaza action in late December. After what I would describe as mild public outcry, his proposal was eventually toned down to those who work with Israeli military institutions. Ryan is a long time provincial NDP and federal Liberal supporter and as left wing as they come. He received wide support for his backlist idea within the union itself until he was told to back off by the national heads of the Canadian Union of Public Employees. Ryan did not loose his job as CUPE Ontario president though, nor was he reprimanded in any serious way. If I was running a university and had said that I would not hire Chinese professors because of the PRC's rights record, I would most certainly be called a racist. They would throw me to the dogs and I most certainly would loose my job faster than you can blink an eye. Maybe you could turn a blind eye to Ryan if this was the first time he had done such a thing, but he has a long record of similar slurs.

Of course this is not to say that all left wingers are antisemitic. Within the United States, the Jewish community almost exclusively supports the Democratic Party and Barack Obama has publicly supported Israel. However, there is a rather large faction within predominantly left wing universities and labour unions that are antisemites. They say it takes three people to bully someone. The bully (labour unions, university groups), the victim (Jews), and those who stand idly by while the bully assaults the victim. That last group happens to be mainstream Liberals who let members of their parties and their supporters get away with these actions without saying anything. By creating a double standard, liberals have bred a culture of racism within their own halls. It's time for mainstream liberals to take a long hard look in the mirror if they want to proclaim they are the ones for tolerance of all races and ethnicities. People like Syd Ryan need to be publicly denounced by their mainstream liberal colleagues, followed by having people like him immediately sacked from power.

Update 03/05/09: Michael Ignatiff's guest column in the National Post today echoes what I've said here. So maybe some mainstream liberals are starting to stand up against their far left colleagues.

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Me Fail English?

One of my relatives thought it would be an excellent idea to give me a three month subscription to the Toronto Star for Christmas. The reasoning behind it I later found out was so that she could get a discounted subscription. They can't even give that paper away. Sprawled out on the front page of today's Saturday Star was the headline "Race, Poverty Matter as Early as Grade 3". I didn't read the article since I cannot stand the Star but it did have a chart breaking down literacy between race and family income. The chart examined the pass rates for the grade 3 literacy test. Top performers were East Asians (Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, Korean) with 68% pass rates. Whites and South Asians (Indian, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Sri Lankan) tied for second place with 60%, and South-East Asians (Thai, Filipino, Malay, Vietnamese, Lao, Cambodian, Indonesian, Singaporean) rounded out third with 55%. At the bottom of the list were blacks (43%), Middle Easterners (40%) and Latinos (37%) rounded out the bottom three. For income, those with parents over $100,000 had a 66% pass rate while those with parents making less than $30,000 had a 47% pass rate.

The Star of course is trying once again to stir the race and class war pot, as social democrats are inclined to do to keep themselves relevant. There's a whole lot of arguments that can be made here, such as systemic racism by whites is keeping blacks behind while "Islamophobia" is holding Muslims back. Or that poorer people cannot afford school supples and books. I guess poor people have never heard of a library. (They loan you books, for free!) However, there is one huge problem that the Star completely misses, and that is that on average half of Toronto third graders can't read! That is alarming considering that this is a first world country with a properly funded education system. Typically, people like the Star would blame Mike Harris, despite the fact he hasn't been premier for some seven years now. When these children started school, the self styled "education premier" Dalton McGuinty had already been in power for two years. Obviously the education system is failing our students. Of course I still remember my first hand experience with this. I was never taught how to write an essay properly until grade 12 when I finally had a teacher intelligent enough to show me. Children are forced to deal with vague instruction and lack of help from lazy educators and even lazier parents. Ironically, after all those years of getting bad marks on high school papers, it turned out to be my strongest skill in university. Earlier, my weakness in math was blamed on attention deficit disorder. Of course I didn't have it, and once again poor educators were to blame. All I needed was better motivation and my parents pushed me to do better. I learned that I had to only rely on myself. When things went wrong, I was the only one to blame, and that made things easier. When I think back to my school days, I had a startling number of really bad teachers who had no business in that profession.

What about the race aspect though. Why are 20% fewer backs able to read than whites are? A lot of it has to do with culture. African-American culture doesn't exactly encourage its members to excell, just the opposite. They're fed the same old garbage that whites are always going to keep them down so therefore there's no point in trying. As much as I dislike Obama, one has to admit he is a well read individual and I have known many other blacks who are the same. Why are they excelling while they others aren't. Simple; their parents pushed them to do so. If you are constantly told you'll never make something of yourself and that's somebody else's fault, you're going to start believing that. Then again, that's what liberals do, and is why the Star is framing the story this way. According to them, when you or your children fail, it's always somebody else's fault, never yours. By using this thought process, the black community is sabatoging the future of its own youth. The same goes for Latinos and Middle Eastern kids. By the same token, there's still the issue that less than two thirds of white kids can read, yet they're supposed to be the ones in society's good graces getting the best of everything. How well one does in school has nothing to do with their race or parental income; it has everything to do with their drive to succeed. We're seeing these numbers because parents and educators are failing to encourage students to do well. Race based schools won't fix this problem, but hiring better educators who are dedicated to those they teach will. Somebody just needs to give these kids a good swift kick up the backside.

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Tracking Green Waste

My last article dealt with the huge sums of money the province of Ontario has wasted in combating climate change. It is frequently said that going green will have little to no economic impact. I'm calling shenanigans on them. So, I'm going to start tracking green waste both here in Canada and abroad to come up with a global measure of just how much governments have spent throwing good money into the AGW wishing well. I've also added a note on what useful things we could have spent the money on; such as feeding the hungry or providing educational supplies for children. You'd be surprised at just how much that money could have actually helped people had it been diverted away from chasing carbon. Total cost will be an approximation benchmarked in US Dollars. I'll update this semi regularly as I come across stories.

Government Agency: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
Money Wasted: $273,000,000 USD
Wasted on: Launching a "CO2 Hunter" satellite to map global sources of carbon dioxide. Satellite failed shortly after launch and crashed.
What We Could Have Bought: 1.08 million tons of rice at current $250/tonne international commodity prices. Enough to feed 4.32 billion people assuming 250 gram (1/2 pound) serving.
Source: BBC News

Government Agency: Province of Ontario
Money Wasted: $4,013,000,000 USD ($5 billion CAD)
Wasted On: Green energy plan to build windmills that nobody wants, in a province where it's not windy enough to produce sufficient supplies of electricity.
What We Could Have Bought: 10 million netbook computers, enough for every school child and university student in Canada. One year's worth of university tuition in Ontario for approximately 700,000 people at an average of $6000 per year.
Source: National Post

Government Agency: Province of Alberta
Money Wasted: $1,605,200,000 USD ($2 billion CAD)
Wasted On: Carbon sequestering program for five demonstration projects to bury carbon dioxide underground. Unproven technology that is not commercially viable. Plus I get the feeling that that CO2 can't stay buried forever.
What We Could Have Bought: Clean bottled water for 1.33 billion people assuming average price of $1.50 for 500ml. Enough for all of Africa with plenty to spare.
Source: Edmonton Sun

Government Agency: City of Toronto, Ontario
Money Wasted: $111,444 USD ($140,000 CAD)
Money Wasted On: C-40 Climate Office and "Secretariat" in London, England. Toronto's mayor David Miller is the chair of the climate change organization. Money hidden in budget.
What We Could Have Bought: 50,909 trips on public transit in the city at $2.75 per ticket.
Source: CFRB's Bill Carroll Show 02/27/2009

TOTAL GLOBAL GREEN WASTE TO DATE: $5,891,311,444 USD
Last Updated: February 27th, 2008

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Wasting Green on Green

The green economy kind of reminds me of a wishing well. You throw money down it fully knowing you probably won't get anything in return. Despite this, something compels people to keep throwing their pennies in. The Ontario Government falls into this category, as do a lot of other left leaning governments across North America. The saviour of our economic woes is going green, and it has the added benefit of saving us from climate change. However, this doesn't make much sense to me, probably because I have half a brain. At best, the green economy at present represents a niche market. How many people do you know own a Prius, or any other hybrid car for that matter. In my circle of friends and acquaintances, I don't know a single person that does. Nobody in my neighbourhood owns one. Yet somehow the government keeps trying to sell me on the "fact" that the US automakers building hybrids will save that industry. It's the same thing with these idiots at Tesla Motors trying to sell luxury electric cars to people, despite the fact that a successful EV line has not been sold in North America in almost 100 years. Green cars cost more than gasoline powered ones due to the cost of the batteries. Right now, people are going to be looking for low cost cars. The reason American automakers are failing is that they've failed to build a low cost commuter car that is reliable. This is why Honda and Toyota have eaten them alive. Switching to hybrid lines, by all logic, isn't going to make a lick of difference.

The second part of this has to do with Ontario's plan to invest huge sumsof money in wind farms. Windmills are expensive and inefficient and nobody wants one near their house. "Tough luck" says Dalton McGuinty. Despite backing down on Oakridges and allowing developers to put up houses on protected land at the base of the Niagara Escapement in Halton, McGuinty is now fancying himself as an environmental crusader. This is just the latest harebrained bandwagon issue for the left. It will create jobs they say. Imagine taking an auto assembler or white collar office worker and getting them to put up windmills. They wouldn't know what to do and no amount of "retraining" is going to change that. These jobs are not sustainable and the whole concept behind them is hugely impractical. Of course, it's another example of McGuinty pretending to do something to fix the problem without actually doing anything at all. I'm surprised he hasn't blamed Mike Harris yet for the economy, though he does blame him for the energy woes the windmills will supposedly solve. What he doesn't like to remind people is how he pushed through the demolition of the Lakeview generating station without anything to replace it, simply because it was coal fired. Nothing to replace it with. Mississauga now refuses to allow any more power plants in the city, with Hazzle "Past Her Sell By Date" McCallion saying they should be built in Milton. We're in a big economic mess and pouring money into niche and dying industries is not going to solve the problem.

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Canadian Content Laws Foolishly Archaic

Flashpoint, an action/cop drama TV series was picked up by CBS before CTV did. Apparently, it's quite popular in the United States. It's also a Canadian show following a fictional group of elite Toronto police officers, filmed in Toronto, and produced by CTV. Degrassi: The Next Generation, another CTV program, is also hugely popular in the US and has been picked up by many so called "Superstation" networks. This is why it puzzles me when the CRTC keeps saying that there need to be Canadian content regulations on Canadian airwaves in order to protect Canadian media from being overshadowed by the United States. This sort of concept is just so mind bogglingly archaic in the information age. The CRTC now wants to try and project this power to the internet, an impossible task which would likely involved increased censorship online, opening up a huge can of worms if they limit what sites Canadians can visit.

Back in the 1940s & 1950s, Canadian airwaves were dominated by by American broadcasts. It was thought that these were poisoning the minds of Canadians so the CBC, the government subsidized network, was created to provide Canadians with more "highbrow" programming that was exclusively Canadian. However, laws limiting what could and could not be broadcast didn't come in until much later. They appeared in the 1970s under everyone's favourite liberal fascist Pierre Trudeau. Since then, the government mandates that media providers in Canada must be Canadian owned and must dedicate a minimum percentage of broadcast hours to Canadian programming. I do not have the data in front of me but I believe it is about 8% to 20%. Off course, these laws were created at a time before satellite TV became popular, and long before the internet became a third television medium. We claim to be a multicultural society yet we still hold onto these archaic laws. I'm sure many Canadians would love access to TV programming from their own countries without being harassed by the CRTC for it not having enough "Canadian" content. Canadians who wish to use American satellite services are harassed for buying "grey market" dishes just so the CRTC can keep Starchoice and Bell in a duoopoly.

Shows like Flashpoint have proven that Canadian content can succeed internationally in the internet age without the long arm of the government propping them up, as they do with the never ending list of bad CBC programming. Arguably, the Internet has been a powerful medium to broadcast our content through sites like Youtube. It costs very little for Canadian artists to produce their own TV series and upload them to the web. Any sort of web regulation protecting this is totally unnecessary and just another case of a government body attempting to overregulate. Forcing Canadians to watch Canadian content is no longer an appropriate way to go about things. Rather, the government should be encouraging investment in our nation's media industries to encourage them to produce more high quality content that people would actually watch. US networks have shown that Americans do enjoy our stuff as long as it's not about weird sex and snow shoes, as one movie title on the Canadian film industry put it. Lets end broadcast censorship in Canada and openly embrace the digital age as a new way to showcase our tallent to the world.

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Doing Drugs A Victimless Crime? Tell that to the Mexicans

Time and time again, you hear the same old garbage from the pro-marijuana supporters and other miscellaneous liberals spouting that consumption of illicit narcotics is a victimless crime. I always laugh at that considering how many people are tortured or murdered in the process of getting those drugs to the end user. Kelly McPharland of the National Post wrote a good article about how drug cartels are taking over Mexico, threatening to collapse the country. Since 2007, more than 7,300 people have been murdered as the direct result of the drug war that is going on there. This is a higher death toll that than that of all Coalition troops in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. It has gotten to the point where police and the Mexican military are powerless against the drug cartels running amok across the country. In the northern states bordering the US, it the murder of police officers is almost a daily occurrence. Brazen criminals have hacked into police radio systems to announce their next targets, which they usually follow through on. The drug dealers are not even afraid of the 45,000 military troops hunting them down. Last month, the severed heads of several Mexican soldiers were discovered in Acapulco and an ex-general working on a drug enforcement squad was murdered near Cancun.

Oddly, what has been happening in Mexico has received next to no attention from the mainstream media in North America. Other than the Post, the only stories I've seen about it were on the BBC. I focused on Latin American history while in university so I have some idea of what goes on there However, most people are blissfully unaware of this crisis. It strikes me as alarming considering the close proximity of the United States to Mexico and how conflicts there usually tend to spill over the border. Reports have come out of cartels opening satellite operations within southern US states including California and at least as far east as Alabama. Don't think that Canada is immune to this either. In 2008, police in Halton, Toronto, and Hamilton made sweeping arrests of a violent Latino drug gang who was attempting to set up shop in the Greater Toronto Area. From what I've been told, these people make the Crips and Bloods look like naughty school boys. Mexico is also a popular vacation spot for Canadians. We've already seen several tourists die mysterious deaths in the region and it is well known that "rich" North Americans frequently call for sizable ransoms. Nobody has been immune to the violence, even children.

The question is what can we do. The reality is that much of this is our fault. North Americans seem to have an insatiable appetite for illicit narcotics, primarily cocaine which is what these cartels are trafficking. Stopping the problem is not as simple as legalizing it, as the Netherlands learned. While cigarettes and alcohol are legal and government regulated, that certainly hasn't stopped the multi-billion dollar smuggling of those items. It may seem trite to blame America. However, it's hard not to ignore that at the vary least we are contributing to the problem. This is why we need to step up the war on drugs within our own country by increasing sentences for drug possession and trafficking, as well as improving drug rehabilitation programs. The problem needs to be dealt with sooner rather than later. What is now festering in Mexico is a powder keg which threatens to overtake all of North America. It was much easier to ignore Columbia when they went through the same issues but it's much more difficult to ignore what your neighbour does.

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The Dangers of Fairness

Those following American politics might be familiar with something known as the Fairness Doctrine. The nuts and bolts of it would basically require radio broadcasters to devote equal time to differing opinions. The Democratic party is strongly pushing for this bill as they feel they are being underrepresented on the nation's airwaves. For many years, radio has been dominated by right wing talk shows. Liberal shows such as Air America have been introduced but are considerably less popular. Therefore, the Democrats feel the need to force broadcasters to give them an equal voice, or so they say. There has been a lot of talk about the Fairness Doctrine lately but it is nothing new. To my knowledge, the concept was originally introduced during the Clinton administration but was later shot down by house Republicans. Now that the Democrats, who control the executive and both houses, want to resurrect it.

On the outset, such a law would make sense as you don't want one view to have too much air time. However, it is curious in the fact that the Doctrine singles out radio. Most major television and print media in the United States has a liberal bias. The New York Times, USA Today, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC are all liberal. It is commonly claimed that they are in fact Conservative despite no proof to back this up. Sean Hannity hardly anchors all of CNN alone and Ted Turner is as much a raving liberal lunatic as you can get. FOX News is the only mainstream Conservative TV news network in the country. If the Fairness Doctrine was truely fair as it claims to be, it would also apply to the liberal dominated television and print media, yet it does not. I applies only to conservative dominated radio. So I guess controlling 95% of all media is not enough for liberals and to make things truly fair and balanced, they need to control 97.5% of it. What we have here is blantant censorship by liberals to try and scilence conservatives. If it had been a case of the other way around, there would probably be mass outrage. The media is still a business and should give consumers what they want without government control impossed on it. If liberals can produce a successful program, they should fully be allowed to do so. Conservatives have done this, with hugely popular radio personalities such as Rush Limbaugh. For a group that always claims to be under attack, it seems that American liberals are the ones launching most of the attacks, and abusing their law making powers to do so. Of course this is different from political ads during elections, where a demand for balance accross all networks in regards of allowing advertising is reasonable.

Canadian media is a little different. Could this happen here? Possibly but the Canadian government has done a pretty good job at staying out of the media, notwithstanding the ludicrous "Candian content" rules.

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"Like Drunken Sailors": Cities Need to be Audited

Yesterday, Toronto released it's 2009 budget. Property taxes went up 4% but combined with other taxes the city now charges, the actual tax burden for Torontonians increased 10%. This is typical of many GTA municipalities. In Mississauga, property taxes increased about 4.4% but also came with increased service charges and transit fee hikes. Milton increased their property taxes by 6%. It's interesting to note that this is significantly higher than the rate of inflation would warrant. However, the quality of city provided services do not seem to be improving. Road building has been put on hold region wide, garbage collection is getting irregular, parks are getting dirty and untended, water quality is declining. Any resident of the GTA has to ask themselves where all this money is going if it's not being reflected upon in the services we receive.

Of course, then there's all the stuff you here about the colossal amount of waste that goes on at city halls across the region. Milton for example has spent several hundred thousand dollars to install a custom made glass wall, imported from Britain, in it's new town hall. Milton's mayor Gord Krantz jetted off to China last year on tax payer dollars to attend a conference along with other GTA mayors. Toronto's mayor David Miller takes the cake though for wasteful spending, including the multi-million dollar renovation of his own office, 70km of new bike paths that nobody wanted, 30 some odd new programs the city can't afford, a needless restoration of Nathan Phillips Square and Union Station, "green" hybrid transit buses that break down, his jet setting to international environmental conferences to push the city's green initiatives, and hugely bloated office budgets. One of this expenses included paying $80,000 for a woman to water plants in councilors' offices. I wish I had that job. Halton region uses three trucks to pick up garbage, green bin, and recycling while US municipalities use only one. Each truck is manned by two men. Toronto's NDP council has given into union demands for exorbitant wage hikes, which the city cannot afford. This equates to vote buying. The city has refused to contract out work, which would save money, and has replaced current contracted jobs with public service union ones. This is only the tip of the iceberg for questionable spending at the region's city halls.

Lets face facts here, we have a major problem on our hands when it comes to how Ontario's municipalities spend tax dollars. Every time the federal or provincial budget comes out, you hear the mayors screaming for more funding from the higher levels. It is true that cities are now paying for things that they didn't used to, such as welfare, but there is just so much waste, it's mind boggling. Right now, we are in a recession. Money is tighter than ever and yet the cities are asking for more and more tax money. Money that people just don't have. A lot of people are being forced out of their homes simply because they cannot afford to pay what the city wants. This is part of why Toronto has seen a massive exodus of residents in the last year. Housing is cheaper outside of the city.

Cities say they have a massive funding shortfall and cannot afford to pay for services, and therefore have to raise taxes by huge amounts. However, there is a great deal of questionable practices going on. It's time the Province stepped in and did something about the issue. Ontario needs to appoint a series of independent auditors and ombudsmen to dive into the books of our municipalities in order to get a clear picture of what's really going on. It's obvious that they cannot keep their own houses in order and unfortunately, this is the only way we're going to get some answers and solve the problem. Additionally, Ontario needs to repeal the City of Toronto Act to remove the special taxation powers and extended terms the McGuinty government foolishly gave to municipalities. All it has done is open the door to more mismanagement and corruption. Lastly, please, get out there and vote in your next municipal election. One of the reasons that city councils aren't being transparent to citizens is because nobody votes, so they don't care what they do. By not voting, you're basically giving these people who get in again and again free reign to do whatever they want.

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McGuinty's HST Plan Nickle & Diming

When I need to buy computer parts online, I usually buy then from British Colombia for a couple of reasons. First of all, Ontario doesn't have any decent places to buy parts. Secondly, it's cheaper, namely because I don't have to pay PST on items purchased out of province. That is, provided that my province doesn't have a harmonized sales tax. HST basically combines GST and PST into one tax that is collected by the federal government, where they then give the PST cut to the provinces. Dalton McGuinty is putting forth the idea to implement HST in Ontario. He claims it will help Ontario businesses. He is right in a sense since it will make online shopping outside of Ontario more expensive, thus forcing consumers to adopt more local means. However, I see it as just more nickle and diming from the tax obsessed premier. The tax basically implements protectionism within your own country by punishing people who choose to purchase things from another region. It all boils down to just another scheme to get more tax dollars from Ontario residents.

This is pretty typical for the McGuinty Liberals though. It is extremely easy to implement and the feds are ultimately the ones doing most of the work. Liberals like quick fix, one hour photo solutions to complex problems. Lets face it, most Ontarians are not regularly buying things out of province. It punishes a minority while not fixing the economic slump that it seeks to address. However, to more feeble minded individuals, it gives the illusion that McGuinty is doing something to fix the economy when he actually isn't. Of course he should be encouraging investment in Ontario but taxation is not a good way of doing so during a recession. The appropriate way is to launch promotional campaigns, cut business taxes, and make Ontario an overall attractive place for business; rather than nickle and diming residents and throwing huge sums of money at dying industries.

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Obama's "Buy American" Gaffe: Doing Exactly What He Said He Would

Hmm, Obama took longer than I thought he would to screw things up. I had originally figured he would do it on the first day. Still, less than two weeks later we've already had his first major gaffe. While busying himself with the all important mission to delay the DTV switchover, B. Hussain Obama came up with the brilliant economic plan now known as "Buy American". The plan basically says that resources used for projects as part of his $819 billion stimulus package will have to come from American contractors and producers only. World finance chiefs have called the plan a bad idea and Canada, a major supplier of lumber and steel to the US, is vowing to fight the plan tooth and nail. So less than two weeks into his term, Obama has already threatened to spark a trade war with America's top trading partners: Canada, Mexico, and China; plus numerous other nations. The opposition parties in Ottawa have stated they plan to put pressure on the Harper government to try and work out a deal with Washington to get the plan nixed. In this era of minority governments and coalition threats, it's hard to get all of parliament to agree on anything. This tells you just how dumb an idea "Buy American" is.

Is Obama's protectionist stance really a surprise to anybody? Though I didn't mention it in my blog, I had noted to several friends many months ago that McCain would be the better president for Canada. I believed Obama would try to invoke protectionism due to the impending financial collapse and his alliances with the big American unions. Seems I was correct. Simply put, the while Canadians may not like their social policies, the Republicans' push for free trade and free enterprise is ultimately the best for us. We rely on trade with the US to keep our economy going. If it stops, we could fall into a deep recession, or at worst the dreaded "D-word". The plan is ultimately bad for the United States as well since many corporations rely on international trade with Canada and America's other major trade partners.

The federal Conservatives were heavily criticized for "interfering" with the US election when NAFTA-gate "scandal" came to light. The leaked documents said that once in office, Obama wanted to renegotiate NAFTA. The plan was to add more protection for American producers against cheaper Mexican and Canadian goods. Remember that this was primarily what the Softwood Lumber Dispute was about. So I guess if you loose the game, change the rules for the next round to suit you. Telling Canada to buy their goods but them turning around and saying they won't buy ours is like Obama giving us a giant middle finger. Barack's supporters originally dismissed the fact that he would attempt to do this, but were intregued by the idea. The socialist left, of which Obama is a member, has always had a huge anti-NAFTA hardon. This is despite the fact that most academics I have encountered seem to agree that NAFTA has brought major benefits to all three of its members. The National Post called the "Buy American" plan "exporting unemployment", since it fails to help or even acknolwedge the global economy crisis. It only protects the big unions, which is where good deal of Democratic campaign funding comes from. While jobs might be created in the US, corresponding jobs will be lost in other countries. "Buy American" is a zero-sum game. Only two weeks into power and the world that loved him so much is now forming a united front against his stimulus package. I guess the honeymoon is over for the Hawaiian Messiah.

Updated Feb 3rd, 2009

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The Why Files: School Bans Oh Canada

Every so often, I come across news stories regarding strange rules or behaviour and I just have to ask myself "why?" In the first of what I hope will be a continuing series, lets head over to New Brunswick and to Belleisle Elementary School where the principal has scrapped the daily tradition of singing Oh Canada before classes.

A principal's decision to eliminate the morning tradition of singing O Canada at a tiny New Brunswick school has sparked outrage among parents across the country and renewed a heated debate about the encroachment of political correctness in the classroom.

Principal Erik Millett of Belleisle Elementary School in Springfield, N.B., a small community about 90 kilometres southeast of Fredericton, scrapped the morning ritual in the summer of 2007, citing concerns from several parents. But the issue failed to gain much notice until this week, after a mother complained about the policy to local media.

The debate has since traveled to the upper echelons of government, drawing a sharp rebuke from federal Veterans Affairs Minister Greg Thompson, who said publicly he views Mr. Millett's decision as an assault on a proud tradition.

For his part, Mr. Millett has stood firm behind his decision, offering a myriad of reasons for nixing the morning anthem - most notably the effort to accommodate parents who did not want their children taking part. Citing privacy reasons, he has not explained the source of the parents' objections, whether religious or otherwise.

"Is it right or is it fair for children who are not allowed to sing the anthem to be forced to?" Mr. Millett asked in an interview with the Telegraph-Journal newspaper. "Different families have different beliefs.... It's not up to me as a school administrator to subject kids to something their parents don't want them exposed to. I have to protect the minority rights as well as the majority rights." --National Post Thursday January 29th, 2009

Well, this is certainly odd as I cannot find anything possibly offensive about singing our national anthem. I do know that New Brunswick does have a sizable francophone population but I was unaware of any strong separatist movement existing there, so that rules out that as reasoning. Maybe it has to do with immigrants being offended by it, to which I ask "why are you even in this country if you don't like what it stands for." Most likely, it's political correctness run amok and creating victims of "offensive" content where none exist. For making a fool of himself for the tireless practise of trying to hard to be inoffensive, Erik Millet, you're being inducted into the Idiots Hall of Shame.

I'm also adding Google to the Idiots Hall of Shame because of the way Blogger handles bold and italics. Why is it I can't turn off italics after I've written something using it. I hit the button to turn it off, it shows it is unselected, yet it continues to write in italics. Could somebody please fix this?! Blogger has been a bit squirrely lately, which is why some of the text layout in my recent posts looks off.

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Ex-NASA Boss Is Now AGW Sceptic

It's been a while since I've talked about climate change, or at least at length about it. Despite the green movement continuing to push forward, more and more high profile scientists are coming out and announcing that they have converted to climate scepticism. Ex-NASA boss Dr John Theon is one of them. He ran the agency and was responsible for the works of James Hansen, who had argued to congress the increasingly apocalyptic vision of climate change. Hansen is one of the top pro-AGW theory advocates.

According to Theon, “my own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit. Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy.”

Hansen is in charge of GISS, which has been accused of fudging historic climate numbers to outright misrepresentation of data, such as the October Record High scandal that emerged late last year.

On Hansen's accusations of censorship by NASA, Theon noted “Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA's official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind's effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress."

Like David Suzuki, Hansen had once claimed he wished to see energy executives jailed for denying climate change. A lot of information is now beginning to emerge that is strongly suggesting that the climate numbers being made to form public policy were deliberately altered to conform with the theory. For a long time, I've been saying that this goes against scientific method, and Theon agrees with me. It's all about money and/or fulfilling some greater hidden agenda the left wing has. I always find it funny how liberals mock Christians for believing the disproven theory of intelligent design, yet they continue to strongly push the disproven theory of anthropogenic global warming.

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Remember, These People Are Professionals...

It's been two years since I wrote a piece mocking academics for being out of touch with modern society. I think the York University strike by teaching assistants and contract staff has only reinforced my negative view point of academia. The Canadian Union of Public Employees has become Canada's second most powerful union. It is perhaps only superseded by the wealthy Ontario Teachers Federation. At one time, people only entered the public service out of a sense of duty, or that was the only job one could get. People never joined the public service to make money. Now, it seems that notion has done a complete 180. Today, public employees are some of the best paid workers in the country, have iron clad job security, and benefits even most can only dream of. Still, that's not enough for these people. It seems like every time their contracts go up, they go to the bargaining table, turn down lucrative new contracts, fain outrage, and go on strike. In the end, they're forced back to work by the legislature and end up getting their exorbitant demands. This is exactly what has been going on at York U, where striking staff refused a 9% pay increase when most of us will be lucky to see a raise at all. Of course you get the same pithy slogans about the strike not being about money and that they're fighting for something bigger, like more funding for post secondary institutions. Please. Is that the best they can do? The strikers at York U have effectively held students hostage. They have become the real victims in a fight about pure greed. It's extortion. The legislature is now debating back to work legislation, which CUPE has determined to fight since it would effectively end their scheme. Of course, we get another pithy slogan about that fight will protect all unions since any big corporation will just be able to get parliament to force striking workers back on the job.

Of course, all these slogans and actions we've seen and heard a million times. Today, CUPE's job action reached a new low. Today, four CUPE members during a march to Queens Park to protest the back to work legislation allegedly assaulted Toronto Police officers. Eye witness reports noted that police were trying to keep a lane free for emergency vehicles, which is standard proceedure in these situations. The strikers kept repeatedly moving into the lane when police moved in to corral them. An altercation broke out where witnesses said the strikers attacked first. Of course, CUPE is claiming police brutality and that they had done nothing wrong. I believe the union did this deliberately to make a political statement. This is a typical protest tactic that you see at G8 summits. However, there's a big difference here. These people are supposed to be professional academics. Does refusing orders to keep a lane free for safety reasons and assaulting police sound professional to you? Remember that these are the same people who are educating the next generation. This move will most certainly backfire on the union. York's reputation has already been severely tarnished by the strike and this is just another black eye. The university has already seen enrollment drop by 25% for the 2009/2010 school year. If enrollment and revenue declines, the university will have no choice but to lay off staff. In doing this, CUPE has effectively cut off its nose to spite their face. Though the allegations have not been proven in court, the university would be wise to fire the employees who were involved in the altercation.

The altercation is not simply a black eye on York or even CUPE alone but one on academia as a whole. Academics have always been radicals, or at least for the last fourty years. Take Bill Ayres for example. However, it is generally expected that professional people do not act in a violent manner towards other human beings, no matter who they are. On one hand you've always had academics proclaiming to be passificts, then you have them attacking police. These actions drag down the public perception of their entire profession. This is why I believe the government has to take swift action against CUPE and make an example out of them. This behaviour is not appropriate.

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Message to York U Students: Sue CUPE

For the years I spent in university, the students' union complained to no end about high tuition fees. Indeed, education today is a vary expensive prospect no matter where you go to school. Now imagine you fork out $5000 or more in tuition and are suddenly forced out of class by TAs on an unjust labour strike. That would leave your blood boiling. Well, that's exactly what's happening at York University, where apparently the working conditions (in a fully heated and air conditioned building with comfy offices) border on being Dickensian. The TAs are fighting for better benefits and the university has already tabled a vary generous 9%+ raise over three years. During this recession, most of the real world will be lucky to get a raise at all over that period, let alone 9%. Of course you get the usual BS that it's not just about money but we all know it is. It just proves how decadent the public services unions have become that they have the gall to strike over such petty things when people are loosing their jobs left right and centre, with thousands more unable to find work at all. It just shows that they live in a total fantasy world.

The Ontario government tabled legislation today to force the striking workers back on the job. However, Howard Hampton has chosen to filibuster the bill, which is highly irresponsible. Ironically, students are one of the NDP's biggest constituencies, which Hampton has effectively alienated. Many students struggle to pay for education and now that money they paid for a service they didn't receive is gone forever. It is a breech of contract in my opinion between students and the university & instructors. The province has promised to increase student loans to the affected students. However, saddling them with even more debt is not a solution. It does not look like McGuinty is going to provide any real aid. My advice to York students would be to launch a class action law suit against the Canadian Union of Public Employees. CUPE has to be punished for stealing the education and money from hard working students. The union should pay back every penny owned to students for holding them hostage. A successful suit would set a powerful precedent, making unions think twice about going on frivolous strikes, which this one is.

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Racism on the Left Part 1: Interracial Relationships

The left wing and racism. The left has traditionally portrayed themselves as the one anti-racist force in the world that buffers the inherently bigoted right. Is this true? Are conservatives really the only ones who are racially discriminatory, or is the left guilty of it as well? I've been wanting to do a series like this for some time but have held myself back due to the fact that the left does tend to label people as racists or crackpots should they ever call them out on their own hypocrisies. However, there are many topics I want to discuss that I feel need to be discussed. I argue that the left does not have the clean hands it pretends to have when it comes to racism. They are neither anti-racist nor non-discriminatory. This series is intended to make you question the values liberals hold, particularly now as they in the United States are about to present their first minority president to the world.

The Mulatto: From Cosmic Race to Shamed Mutt
The first topic I'd like to cover does involve Barack Obama since he is the product of it; interracial relationships. Human beings are a bit like dog breeders; they tend to value purebreds higher than they do the mutts. Take Obama for example. He is a mulatto: a person who is half black and half white. However, he and his supporters only identify him as black. It's as if he wants to hide or is ashamed of his European heritage. Of course, there are many tactical political reasons for doing so. Similarly goes with Tiger Woods, who is half black, half Asian. He does identify himself as such, unlike Obama, however, the mainstream media does not. During the colonial period in Latin America, interracial relationships were vary common and people of mixed ancestry were highly regarded in society. One Latino writer even called them the "Cosmic Race", believing that they were inherently superior, since they were a mix of the best of all other races. However, this celebration of racial mixing has hit a bit of a brick wall in the last decade. In the 80s and 90s, it was trendy to be involved in an interracial relationship, if you were a white woman. So what changed? Well, nothing did. The environment of our society requires people to make clean, black & white definitions of themselves. Mixed race people can only be one or the other, yet not both at the same time. They're like a square peg in a round hole.

The left has forced this view more than any other organization through their race relations policies. They pretend that mixed race people simply do not exist. Such people usually pick their minority side to identify themselves for a variety of reasons. I believe because this can open more doors to them, but also due to negative stereotypes of whites in society as well as pressure from the minority community. For their parents, the road can be equally difficult. For the sake of argument, we'll look at how white men and their partners in Asian-White relationships have been treated in recent years. Particularly given how controversial this paring has become.

Yellow Fever's Bitter Pill:
There is a stereotype that white men like Asian women. However, it doesn't exactly put a positive spin on this. There are a lot of misconceptions floating around. First off all, it is not as prevalent as some people think it is. There are roughly 504,000 Asian-White marriages in the United States as of the most recent census in 2000. This includes both white male/Asian female and Asian male/white female pairs. This is less than there are homosexual couples, with roughly 660,000 pairs according to the same census. Homosexuals account for 1% of the US population. 3.6% of the 2000 population were Asian and 75% were Caucasian. So instances of WM/AF marriages are rarer than claimed by opponents to such relationships. Secondly, the stereotype's reasoning for entering such relationships is what has really raised my ire over the years.

While I was in university, I took a course on how Western cultures portrayed the history of "the other". The "other" being foreign cultures such as those in Asia, India, and Africa. One particular reading for the course described a 19th century man's first encounter with a Japanese woman while on a trip to the country. He described her as being more beautiful and elegant than the European women of the time. While discussing the article, the class was led to come to the following conclusion. A white obsession with the exotic, the desire to dominate other cultures, and the desire to impose European culture on the Japanese were the reasons he found her so attractive.

The left in academia has created this image of the 19th century white man, and according to them, this way of thinking has persisted right into the 21st century. This point of view is racially discriminatory against whites, since it has been used to demonize white males who enter into such relationships. Of course, this form of racism is a two way street because it has been used to attack Asian women as well, deeming them to be too submissive. This is supposedly why white men "take" them. I have yet to meet one of these so called "submissive" Asian women. The left has basically said that a white man cannot love a woman of another race or culture in the same way as he would a white woman. If he marries a white woman, it is about love. If he marries an Asian woman, it is about dominance and control.

Why the Academic Left Has Done This:
The problem with this liberal academic view is that it is based on numerous old and outdated concepts, and they know this. It assumes that men are dominant and the only ones who can actively seek out a mate; that women do not ask men out. This concept has been dead as long as Sadie Hawkins dances have been in existence. So why are supposedly progressive academics still using it? Secondly, it attempts to take the broad concept of 19th century colonialism and cram it into modern interpersonal relationships. Thirdly, it assumes that all whites are racist and the only reason they enter these relationships is out of racist thinking. Their goal is to assimilate "savage" women and give them "superior" European values.

In their own perverted egalitarian view of the world, liberals like to see all cultures as being inherently homogeneous and isolated. It's as if every society is an lone island in a vast sea. This belief asserts that everyone in a particular culture thinks the same, has the same tastes, and stays limited to within their own narrow, and unchanging cultural practises. Academics believe that notions of individualism and personal taste are a Western phenomenon and do not exist elsewhere. This is why so called "Western" culture has been demonized, despite it largely being a mishmash of different world views. They still see it from the 19th century view of western dominance and fetish for the exotic. To liberals, any sort of cultural mix is a no-no and threatens to pollute these "isolated" cultures of the other with decadent Westernism.

Anti-Interracial Backlash
The point of view projected by the Western left has become so persistent that there has been a great deal of backlash, especially among Asians, regarding these kinds of relationships. Asian men have accused whites of "stealing" their women and leaving no women left for them. Esther Ku on the 2008 season of Last Comic Standing pointed out in her act that Asian men were going to go extinct because of this. Her act was extremely controversial, though more because she joked about old Korean stereotypes.

Ku perpetrated numerous myths about interracial relationships in her act. However, no more fierce has this been said than in a controversial blog post by someone going by the screen name of "SomeKoreangirl", a post which reeked of anti-white racism that made the rounds on the Internet last year. She basically listed out why she would never date a white man, using the vary myths I've noted. That whites were out to control and dominate Asian women, and are taking them away from Asian men. If I had written something on here saying I wouldn't date black women because they're (to quote Don Imus) "nappy headed hoes", I'd have the Canadian Human Rights Commission breaking down my door. White men have also been accused of polluting the Asian race by having children with Asian women.

Once again, this assumes that men are dominant in seeking out mates, and that women do not have their own preferences. It goes against the ideals of women's liberation, a concept the left likes to claim as their own. There are Asian women who prefer and actively seek out white men, contrary to what the myth would have you believe.

It is ironic in a sense that I know more Asian man-White woman relationships that I do the other way around. This includes a close family friend of ours, who is originally from southern Europe. She has been married to a Japanese man for a number of years. Indeed, the stigma does not exist for these types of relationships, or at least is not as prevalent. An Asian man marrying a white woman is seen as empowering or at the vary least ignored, but a white man marrying an Asian woman is scandalized. This could also help partly explain why their children identify themselves as just Asian rather than mixed.

The notion of white men stealing Asian women is ludicrous. As noted earlier, there are less of these marriages than there are gay couples, despite Asians and whites making up a far higher proportion of the American population. It has been said that all stereotypes have some shred of truth but I was unable to find any statistics that back up these "stealing" claims. 1 million people in a nation of 300 million, or 0.33% of the population, is a rain drop in a deluge. The idea that a white man cannot love an Asian woman in the same way he would love a white woman is equally, if not more absurd. The Asian man has become what Ann Coulter has described as the liberals' false victim. They pretend like they're the ones under siege, which allows them to be openly racist against whites. The couple who are scandalized and their children who are forced to deny and be ashamed of their heritage are the real victims.

Conclusion
Liberals claim they are a progressive group despite frequently trying to adapt archaic ideas to modern society. No more has this been seen with interracial relationships. They have taken the broad concept of 19th century colonialism and have tried to apply it to a different time and society. Any competent historian will tell you that while cultures are not islands, history is. You cannot try to fit historical events in to events of a different time. History does not repeat itself. Yet the left still insists on claiming that it does.

The left has created a racially discriminatory atmosphere between white men and Asian women. The idea that white men are inherently controlling, obsessed with the exotic, and seek out submissive, naive "others" is just not true. He can love a woman of another race just as much as he can a woman of his own race. Those who try to claim otherwise are simply bigots. This belief hurts both partners who engage in such interracial relationships, as well as their children who are forced to be torn between two identities when they should celebrate both. In a society that supposedly proclaims racial blindness, no more has racial identity divided people. People should not be made to feel ashamed of their loved ones, or their heritage, simply because they do not match.

(Note: White some have tried to lump Indians, Bangladeshis, and Pakistanis into the mix, I define Asians as being from nations that border the Pacific or from the Indo-China subcontinent. ie Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, Filipino, etc.)

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This Song Goes Out To Obama...

Being a fan of South Park, this song by Issac Hayes couldn't help but remind me of Obama and how the mainstream media treats him. Boom baby.

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Garth Eating Some Humble Pie

The soapbox for the self-obsessed windbag Garth Turner has finally been put out in the recycling bin. Turner wrote the last entry in his blog, announcing that he was shutting it down. Good riddance is all I have to say. While Turner is perfectly entitled to his opinions as much as I am, his blog was basically a bull horn for his self love and crackpot conspiracy theories. As readers will know, Turner's blog got him into a lot of hot water while he was both a Conservative and a Fiberal. Most famous being his double whammy insult to Alberta and Quebec over the summer. After his landslide defeat to Conservative Lisa Raitt in October '08, I guess he's been forced to eat some humble pie over the last couple of months. No more will we have to hear Garth talk about how great Garth is. It's a shame really. It gives me one less thing to mock and ridicule.

Source: National Post

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Jesus Lives! ... In Honolulu?

"Obama, he going to pay my mortgage!" The now famous words that were uttered by a woman during the US election campaign that might have well been uttered by Mammy in some racist 1930s movie. Yes, we are now one week away from when Barack Obama will be inaugurated President of the United States. It is historical, from a certain point of view, that Obama will be America's first white raised mulatto president. What he is really does not effect how he can preform in his job, which is all that should matter. However, the American media has carefully crafted him as being some sort of Jesus-like figure; a black messiah. It's obvious that this tactic has worked. The lady who said that Obama would pay her mortgage honestly believes he will, as do many other African Americans, but more importantly most white liberals. It has affected Canadians on this side of the border as well, with travel agencies arranging road trips to see his "historic" inauguration, as if they were going to see Moses giving the Sermon on the Mound. It is really hard to grip my feeble mind around the lunacy that is "Obamania". Here is a man who's whole campaign was constructed around lies, dodges, and passing the buck. Obama is the proverbial person who can jump into the manure pile and still end up smelling like roses. Whether it be the Reverend Wright incident, or Ayres, or the scandal over his vacant senate seat, or his total lack of executive experience. Let us not forget the fact that liberals have touted his African American victim heritage despite the fact that he is half white, half Kenyan, raised white, by a well off middle class family living in a tropical paradise. Obama is certainly no Eva Peron, as his backers try to make him out to be. As my mother used to say "bullshit baffles brains", and the liberals have been doing that exceptionally well during the whole process from the primaries up to inauguration. Of course, you can make the same accusations of any politician. However, that certainly doesn't excuse him from these issues. The fact that people believe he's going to radically change the world are pure loonies.

I can't help but wonder whether the if messiah status will ultimately hurt Obama, particularly if he chooses a second run at office. The liberal media build up has put an exceptionally high level of expectations on the man, both in the minds of Americans and the global community at large. The real question now is whether he's going to be another FDR, or another LBJ. Right now, America is facing tough economic times and there simply isn't the money or logistics to implement some of the programs he touted, such as socialized medicine. Given how many resources these programs consume here in Canada, it's just not practical. America already has an unprecedented level of debt, amounting to $10.6 trillion at the time of writing, and increasing by $3.4 billion per day. An immediate end to US foreign intervention and the Iraq war is also highly unlikely. The liberal media has already used the recession as a scapegoat to try and force more realistic expectations of Obama. However, Barack Hussain Obama as the messiah figure has been deeply ingrained into the psyche of the American left, and it will take an awful lot of media backpedaling to bring their heads out of the clouds. It's almost like a drug high. There's the euphoria, but then they're going to come down hard when they see Obama as just being another silver tounged populist who doesn't know jack about what he's doing. Especially that lady when she finds out she still has to pay her mortgage bill for the dilapidated house in Chicago that she bought knowing she couldn't afford it. The liberals of course will hang onto the myth, just as they have here over Pierre Trudeau. However, the real deal breaker is whether he can keep the likes of Joe the Plumber happy. With the amount of unrealistic promises he's made, I can confidently say Obama is going to be Americans first black one term president, provided of course the Republicans can push a viable candidate in 2012.

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A Culture of Victimization

I was listening to Opie & Anthony yesterday and the shock jock duo had Ann Coulter on. (Those familiar with the show will know that they do discus serious topics on American politics and current events aside from the usual comedy.) Coulter was on discussing her latest book, titled "Guilty: Liberal 'Victims' and Their Assault on America." Ann Coulter is a controversial figure in US politics. She has been labelled a brainless bimbo and a crackpot. She takes a hard right approach to politics and I do not agree with everything she says, given that I'm more centre right. Still, she is one of the few people in America who is not afraid to stand up and speak her mind, and she can more than hold her own in any debate. You have to respect her for her resolution, or else get chewed out in the process. Our society fears these people because they stir the proverbial pot. The left especially dislikes any sort of opposing views and will often refuse to debate or question their own. The left considers themselves to be enlightened. Their point of view is the only correct point of view and anyone who disagrees should be ignored and silenced. Are there people on the right who are like this? Of course, however, they don't fill the ranks of political power and are often labelled as "right wing nutjobs". The right also lacks the massive propaganda machine the left has amassed through the mainstream media. Canada has largely the same issues regarding lack of debate and elitism on the left, as noted especially with their contempt for the democratic process with the widely unpopular coalition.

Coulter's new book, which I have not read yet, looks at the culture of victimization within the United States. That is, how people make themselves look like a victim to gain power. People believe that if they are being wronged, or have been wronged in the past, that entitles them to special treatment. To automatically pass Go, collect $2 million. In the United States, the most frequent example of this that crops up is African Americans and slavery. Due to rampant racism against them, they should receive special treatment and should be free from criticism. Take a look at how the liberal media has handled Barack Obama. During his entire campaign, he received almost no criticism while McCain, Palin, and Clinton were hammered by the media. Obama on the other hand has been treated with kid gloves as was pointed out by Coulter. What she is essentially saying is because of his race, Obama has been made impervious to criticism. Despite him being mulatto (his mother is white) who's father was from Kenya, he is still identified with the slave ancestors of the majority of African Americans living in the US. Those familiar with history will know that slavery was primarily west African so a Kenyan ancestor will not have shared the same experiences. However, Obama is still portrayed as being a victim of racism in America.

The way liberals treat minorities is the same way one would treat a retarded child who you are playing a game with. You let them win because they are "suffering" and you feel sorry for them. White people are mostly guilty of this since they feel bad that their ancestors participated in slavery. It has been jokingly called "the white man's guilt", a play on the "white man's burden". White people feel guilty for what other white people did so they feel the need to give special treatment to minorities simply because of that. Of course, minority groups have learned how to exploit this, and you cannot really blame them for doing so. They portray themselves as victims some sort of crime that has befallen on their chosen identity group in order to extort power or money out of guilty liberals. In turn, those liberals feel good about themselves for helping the "disadvantaged". The left wingers may have good intentions but ultimately, this thought process is counter productive. Originally, we sought to build a society that was blind to sex, race, religion, etc. In the process of doing so, we've managed to create the exact opposite. Now anyone can claim themselves to be a victim of some past or present injustice, real or perceived, and they use it to get their way. This has worked to create a society that is becoming increasingly divisive, and the left wing is openly encouraging it. Those who wish to constructively criticize the methods of the so called "victims" are called racist, sexist, etc., which ultimately stiffles debate.
This is not to say that true victims of racism do not exist in the United States. However, there is no more of it there than any other given country. Those who try to tell you that America is the most racist country on Earth obviously didn't pay attention in their history classes. The liberals are fostering a society that believes this to be true. None of this rhetoric is of any benefit to our society. Obama and any other minority in power should be held to the same critical standards as their predecessors have been. Americans owe it to themselves to do so. If all men are created equally, they should all be held to the same standards regardless or race, colour, or creed. It is not racist to criticise the president elect, however, it is racist not to.

Ah, but what about Canada? The culture of victimization is probably stronger here than it is anywhere else in the world. Oddly enough, it is Steven Harper fueling it rather than the left wing, thanks mostly to his reparation payments and appologies to "victims" of head taxes, residential schools, etc. Perhaps the biggest exploiters of victimization are Canada's Aboriginal population. The way the government handles them as victims has allowed them to live in a time warp, separated from the rest of the world. Millions of dollars have been spent on native reparations, which has ultimately done nothing to improve their lot. Yet, they still weild a tremendous amount of influence over the government. The whole victimization notion protects them from criticism, even when "protestes" become violent when they don't get their way. Indeed, the American case study with Obama should force us to look at how we handle similar situations in our own country. Simply put, treating people as victims is wrong and does not empower people. It is holding our society back from acheiving the goal we had originally sought out.

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