Tuesday, September 27, 2005

"GEORGE BUSH, THE MAN": A RARE BURST OF CANADIAN REALISM

Below is an excerpt from an article that originally appeared in the "Ottawa Citizen" on 9/11/2005 by David Warren. The link is to David Warren's own site as the article is no longer findable at its original source

"There's plenty wrong with America, since you asked. (Everybody's asking.) I'm tempted to say, the only difference from Canada, is that they have a few things right. That would be unfair, of course -- I am often pleased to discover things we still get right.

But one of them would not be disaster preparation. If something happened up here, on the scale of Katrina, we wouldn't even have the resources to arrive late. We would be waiting for the Americans to come save us, the same way the government in Louisiana just waved and pointed at Washington, D.C. The theory being, that when you're in real trouble, that's where the adults live.

And that isn't an exaggeration. Almost everything that has worked in the recovery operation along the U.S. Gulf Coast has been military and National Guard. Within a few days, under several commands, finally consolidated under the remarkable Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, it was once again the U.S. military, efficiently cobbling together a recovery operation on a scale beyond the capacity of any other earthly institution.

We hardly have a military up here. We have elected one feckless government after another, who have cut corners until there is nothing substantial left. We don't have the ability even to transport and equip our few soldiers. Should disaster strike at home, on a big scale, we become a Third World country. At which point, our national smugness is of no avail...."


I rarely say this but this time I am going to: Read the whole thing. The conclusion of his article is cutting: "Unlike his critics, Bush is a man"

********************************

ELSEWHERE

Hurricane Center: Global Warming Equals Fewer Storms: "Environmentalists who claim global warming has caused an increase in U.S. hurricane activity obviously haven't checked with the National Hurricane Center, which has kept statistics on major storms over the last 150 years. That's probably because those statistics yield one inescapable conclusion: If global warming has had any impact at all on hurricane activity, it's lessened - not increased - the frequency of major hurricanes". [There is much more about this on "Greenie Watch" -- e.g. here and here]

Owen Harries on intellectuals: "Why do intellectuals get things so wrong, so often?" Harries asks. "The question is worth asking because they are still with us, still vocal, still taken seriously by many as interpreters of the course of human history." In answering his own question, Harries suggests that intellectuals are often wrong because thinkers tend to demand coherence in human affairs, looking "for pattern, meaning, and consistency." Since intellectuals tend to be overwhelmingly secular, Harries observes that most intellectuals attempt to find such consistency in the form of ideology. "Ideologies vary a good deal, but among the things they have in common is that they all require great selectivity with respect to empirical evidence," Harries suggests. "That which supports the ideological creed is readily assimilated and emphasized; that which conflicts with it is either noisily rejected or quietly filtered out and ignored."

From a reformed Leftist: "I believe that the key to getting leftists change is to get them to open their eyes and get them off their left-wing media addiction (which leads them to EXCLUDE reading or watching anything that is right-of-center; in other words: their self-censorship - THEIR INNER EXILE). I believe that once reasonable people start to look at events from both sides, they will begin to "see the light." The leftists in the USA and Europe - (and in the academy and in the MSM) - live in a self-imposed totalitarian regime of their own minds; whereas tyrannies like the USSR actively censored all media and prevented their trapped citizenry from reading any real news, and from reading any real history (of Communism or anything else), or from reading Hayek - or anything that opposed their rigid ideology, contemporary post-modern leftists voluntarily censor themselves and restrict their reading and viewing of news and commentary to the left-of-center media (which is still MOST of the media, so they don't FEEL like their censoring themselves)."

Study shows FDR's "New Deal" was politically corrupt: "Couch and Shughart conclude that "political self-interest was perhaps the most important motive underlying the administration's spending decisions. A state's popular vote for FDR in the 1932 election and its importance to the President's electoral college strategy are consistently [statistically] significant determinants of the amount of federal aid it received."

Australian Left tough on terrorist suspects: "Labor wants police to have the power to search anyone found in a suspected terrorist "target area", without police needing a warrant. Opposition Leader Kim Beazley said today that, under a Labor plan, police commissioners would be able to lock down a suburb or area in which terrorists were suspected of planning an attack. Mr Beazley said the plan went further than the Federal Government's idea of allowing state police to detain terror suspects for up to 14 days or track suspects by using electronic tags. "We've put out one suggestion, which is similar to the legislation which exists now in NSW but is a bit tougher, and we think it should be picked up in the other states in a uniform way and by Canberra," he said. "And that is to give the capacity to the police commissioner in any jurisdiction to lock down an area in which you believe a terrorist threat may be emerging or where it's actually occurred," Mr Beazley told ABC TV. "This gives the police substantial powers of search and seizure".

Beazley is a bit wishy-washy about disowning the antisemites in his own party, however: "Opposition Leader Kim Beazley is coming under increased pressure from Australia's influential Jewish community to publicly repudiate Labor MPs who are "Nazifying" Israel, despite its withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. The latest bout of justifiable Jewish angst follows another ugly outburst by Labor backbencher Julia Irwin in federal Parliament two weeks ago".

There is an interesting article here on the weird Muslim beliefs about Jesus.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

**************************

Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)


Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

********************************

No comments: