The prime minister’s decision to leave the meeting early wasn’t sitting well with some chiefs.

“We’re like a bunch of puppies – he says jump, and we’ve got to do it,” said Regional Chief of Alberta, George Stanley.

If they do not want to be treated like puppies, the chiefs should not be wheeling and dealing with statesmen.

If there was any merit to their complaints or demands, the native chiefs would present themselves like honorable men: publicly and openly addressing the Canadian people.

Native uprising? That will be the day.

“The world is watching.”

No, they are not.

“In today’s world that response will be more instantaneous.”

No, it will not.

My suggestion to the natives is to start their own media blitz.

Victims’ families have reported being intimidated by elements of the elder-assisted process — such as the convention that the hearing be conducted sitting in a circle.

I do not get it. It just does not make sense to get upset over this. Either sitting across a table or around in a circle, the convict is going to have a parole hearing whether we like it or not.

I hope this is not just racism against aboriginal culture.

Unfortunately, there are people who are under the illusion that this can be stopped and insist on more bailouts. I believe that is misguided. Whether they like it or not, Europe will go into recession. It is not a question of if but of when the recession will occur.

In years to come, people will closely examine why the statesmen failed the proletariat. I have faith that future generations will be able to point to the printing of money as the source of malinvestment and recessions. There is no more boogeyman nor foreign invader. The source of the economic problem is found in government monopolization of money and the selective distribution of cheap money to the rich. Historians will have no choice but to link the century of warfare with the century of the failed central banking experiment.

The sooner the default, the sooner the economy can approach stability. Private investors will shy away from trusting government borrowing. Creditors will be more critical when they accept borrowers. Malinvestment will slow down and resources will be invested more astutely.

Back to the present.
The affluent Europeans will know what it is like to be economic refugees and they will feel for a long time in their own native land. Canadians should prepare themselves for massive immigration from Europe. We will be going back to our roots.

“We were expanding the debate,” Lavoie told CTV’s Power Play in Ottawa on Monday.

I would like to see the debate expand towards decriminalization and end there. We do not need the regulation. Regulation is just a different way of making the same thing illegal.

What the anti-Harper yahoos forget is there good reasons for the residency requirements since a divorce involves dividing assets and the jurisdiction matters. If you remove the residency requirements then one spouse could file for divorce in the jurisdiction that maximizes their financial advantage at the expense of their ex-partner. The most fair way to resolve this is to use the jurisdiction where the couple resides at the time of divorce.

There may be some good that comes out of this absurd media stunt. People may realize that marriage recognition should not be a one-size-fits-all rule. There should be variation in marriage contracts. The government should not be monopolizing this industry. People want variety!

I have touched on this before:

Credit bureaus, better business bureaus and safety standards are business models to emulate. Just like your credit rating can be recorded, reported, amended and researched, your marital status can be registered in the same manner without the need for government. It does not even have to be very complicated. Private formal marriage registries can be as simple as a copyright office.

If governments do not abandon their control of marriage law,
then I will expect prenuptial agreements to become more common.

In 25 years from now, Facebook will corner the private marriage contract market.

The artificial demand for US Dollars is slipping away. The Iranians need to be taught a lesson again and again and again until everybody is forced to use the American printed paper currency.

In fifty years from now, Economics 101 classes will dispense of the false label of fiat currency to describe modern exchange. Instead, they will use the more correct term: forced currency.

Hat tip to The Council for the National Interest Foundation.

A profoundly instructive moment on this point occurred in Saturday night’s debate when Josh McElveen of WMUR-TV asked whether it ought to be legal for same-sex couples to adopt children.

The correct answer to this is: No. It was, is, and always will be wrong for any government to hand over in an adoption the custody of a child to a homosexual couple. A government that does so violates the God-given right of the child to be raised by a mother and father…

Yet when McElveen put his question to Rick Santorum, Santorum failed to give a coherent answer. Santorum seemed to say — although his exact meaning was unclear — that although he wanted a constitutional amendment to define “marriage” as the union of one man and one woman, the question of same-sex adoptions was up to state governments to decide…

If a homophobe can’t count on Rick Santorum to Protect The Children from show tunes and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy re-runs, then who can he count on?

Ever the model of level-headedness, NRO‘s Andy McCarthy counters:

… and Terence Jeffrey is wrong. Adoption, like marriage, is not a matter the Constitution commits to federal government control. It is, like the vast run of day-to-day issues, a matter to be determined by the states. There is nothing conservative about imposing federal government mandates on matters the Constitution gives the federal government no say over.

…

If Mr. Jeffrey wants a federal adoption standard imposed, then he should be arguing for a constitutional amendment banning adoptions by gay couples…

I guess a refuation based on constitutional technicalities is better than no refutation at all. ‘Twould have been nice, though, had someone at NRO objected to the substance (such as it was) of Mr. Jeffrey’s (vapid) blog post.

Perhaps, just perhaps, offering orphans a loving and stable home is a better option than shuffling them through the system, one’s prejudices aside.

What I hate is the fact that free trade does not exist and everybody ignores injustice in the economy. Recent international events constantly demonstrate that we do not have international free trade. In China, local citizens are protesting the construction of a coal-fired plant where they live. The Chinese stooges who work for the government are beating them into submission.

There may be nothing that anybody can do to stop the evil Chinese government. However, we should not delude ourselves into thinking that the cheap junk we get from Chinese factories demonstrates the benefits of industrialization for them and the benefits of free trade for us.

The truth is that we benefit from both outright theft and our ignorance of the truth.

I have heard no good argument in favour of this measure. There are other ways of confirming identity, and their are other ways to accommodate the very few new Canadians with this particular religious conviction. This move is based neither in principle nor in necessity. The Tories have an axe to grind, and they don’t care if they chip away at our freedom of religion.

Here’s the video of him firing his air guns!

All of this isn’t too surprising considering his stellar performance during the last election campaign:

Read that post and the comments. The comments from the atheists are very intriguing. They seem to have great difficulty accepting the free choice of theists to peacefully disassociate themselves from atheists when given the choice.

I have a question of my own for the atheists: Do you feel entitled to socialize with people who freely choose to avoid you?

“The bottom line is that senior-level people in Washington, in the name of keeping in touch with their stakeholders, are tipping their hands,” says Adam Zagorin, a senior fellow at the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington watchdog group. “You can’t prosecute them for insider trading if they didn’t trade the shares. You may not be able to even reprimand them. What the hell are the rules?”

An official such as Paulson has no legal obligation to keep material nonpublic information to himself, says Phillip Kaplan, partner for litigation at Manatt Phelps & Phillips LLP, where he specializes in securities and class-action cases.

– SNIP –

Morgan Stanley and BlackRock Inc. both helped the Federal Reserve and OCC prepare the reports on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that Paulson told the New York Times would instill confidence the morning of the Eton Park meeting.

This is not coming from a gossip tabloid.

At least they are not afraid to say the word Christmas.

Despite the merit of the science behind the BloodIsBlood campaign, I doubt the people operating the current Canadian blood collection will change their questionnaire and filtering policy because they usually only change in response to a crisis. The general public does not seem to care much either, in my opinion. At the same time, I doubt the general public has any idea how much resources go into making blood available to recipients.

This is the point of the BloodIsBlood campaign: lots of forbidden donors have lots of blood to donate that is never being accepted and scientifically, there is no good reason to reject their blood.

Regardless, I do not trust lab tests to prove the purity of blood and I do not think it is responsible to compel anybody to trust them either. I think the proper solution is to privatize the service by offering parallel collections. People who are in need of blood donations should be required to choose:
1) wait for your blood type to be received by a heterosexual donor, possibly dying for that wait
or
2) get blood from a homosexual donor faster, maybe as fast as tomorrow
or
3) get your own blood in the manner of your choosing

Homosexuals should be free to donate their blood in their own collection agency and offer it to recipients who freely choose their source. If there is public acceptance of gay men donating blood, it will be demonstrated through public choice. If there is truly extra risk involved with receiving blood from homosexuals, the collection agency should bare that risk and take out their own insurance policy. My idea will likely never take off the ground as long as we have a publicly funded/controlled health care system. It will have to wait until everybody goes bankrupt or more people die waiting for anti-gay blood.

More seriously, how can either of these men be even considered by supporters of a mainstream party? Especially when neither Gary Johnson nor Ron Paul can get much traction?

The Republican Party makes me full of sad.

I have been watching the sad events unfold for a few days and I do not believe what has happened. I have known Mr. Michaud since the late 1970′s when we met at  Base Gagetown in New Brunswick. He is a very sincere and dedicated teacher. My receptionist has two children who have, and had him as a teacher and they both speak highly  and enthusiastically of his dedication, interest and sense of history.

I think “Hearsay” about kids pointing guns at passing cars and publishing this is slanderous. As a former trained military person Mr. Michaud would first instill a sense of responsibility in his students. In my basic training this was perhaps the most important aspect of our induction into the military. To tell people that the kids were acting like a game pointing them at cars is very irresponsible. No police reports were filed about this. But, I did hear neighbours were allegedly “complaining” about the event. And as to tanks…no such event occurred. Now if one imagines tanks one can only guess what one can imagine about guns. Time to look at fact.

Mr. Michaud has had a 20 year dream crushed through political correctness. The lesson has not been lost on his students.

The post brought up the topic of political correctness, and I’m confident in suggesting that a sizable chunk of our readership here at The Politic will claim an antipathy towards political correctness. Much of conservatism has prided itself in being politically incorrect, as have I, at times – which is why I wrote such a politically incorrect post.One of the greatest political taboos is to not Support Our Troops. They are, we hear, fighting for Canada – defending our freedom. We owe our liberty, we are told, to those who fought and died in World Wars. They did, no doubt, fight and die in service of their country, but it is politically correct balderdash to claim that they fought defending Canada.

We have not been in Afghanistan for ten years defending Canada. Operation Desert Shield was not a defense of Lethbridge or Sarnia or Cornerbrook. We did not go to Bosnia because of some existential threat to Canada. In fact, dressing up all these operations in “our troops are defending Canada” rhetoric is horribly xenophobic. We are not in Afghanistan to protect Canadians; we are there to protect Afghanis. Using Defending Canada as a justification for such a military action tells us that we only believe that Canadian lives are worthy of the sacrifice. When we talk erroneously about our mission, we are saying that the lives of Afghanis are second rate and not worth the blood of one Canadian.

But the idea that all of our military adventures have been to Defend Canada has ventured into the absurd. In that post, reader dmorris writes:

Guns don’t frighten kids,they know exactly what guns do from their experiences with video games and movies/TV,but they should learn that our “men with guns” are what saved this Country from a holocaust beyond imagining,and there is NO excuse for hiding that fact from immigrants,adult of child. [sic all around]

Just what holocaust did the Princess Pats save us from? There was no imminent concern of the holocaust spreading to Canada. In fact, we sent Jews back to the holocaust. We were complicit. And when we weren’t turning away persecuted Jews, we were setting up our own internment camps for Japanese Canadians.

The idea that all Canadian soldiers everywhere are fighting and dying for us is bogus. They are serving their country, but that doesn’t mean they are defending it. It is politically correct to play along with the lie, but I’m not going to do it. The men and women stationed in Afghanistan are not protecting Canadians (other than each other); they are trying to protect Afghanis. It seems insulting to demand that we all misrepresent the nature of their mission.

I know I’m smashing at a hornet’s nest here. I know that many Canadians have bought into the Defending Our Freedom mantra, but it’s simply not true, and I’m tired of trying to be politically correct about it.

Mr. Del Mastro, a Conservative, objected to Mr. Trudeau speaking at a Catholic school:

“If they are looking for a truly great speaker, who also happens to be Catholic, perhaps they might invite (Immigration) Minister Jason Kenney,” Del Mastro wrote on Oct. 12.

“Are there any tenets of the Catholic faith that Justin supports?”

That’s a nice rhetorical slight of hand. Mr. Del Mastro didn’t have to make any accusations or even have any proof the Mr. Trudeau is a bad Catholic; he just flipped it around, because – I guess – it must be just oh so obvious that Mr. Trudeau is a heretic.

This isn’t cool. Mr. Del Mastro owes Mr. Trudeay an apology. This is not the sort of behaviour that should be considered acceptable in a public servant.

For the past 19 years, students at an Ottawa high school have hoisted 10-pound military rifles to feel what it may be like to lug one around in the muddy trenches. They’ve met veterans and heard their stories, learning how their families were affected and what it was like to fight so far from home.

But this year — the year that was supposed to mark the 20th Remembrance Day Symposium at Notre Dame High School — they will get no such chance.

The traditional school event, scheduled for Nov. 10, has been cancelled because of a school committee decision to ensure there were “no tanks or guns” at the event, its co-ordinator told participants in an email last Friday.

This may seem like political correctness run amok, but there are some other layers to the story.

The event was cancelled because some students who hail from countries touched by war raised concerns about it last year, said Lauren Rocque, a spokeswoman for the Ottawa Catholic School Board.

“There are many students in that school that come from war-torn countries and when they saw replica guns in the hallway, it did upset them.”

Ms. Rocque was unable to say whether the students had complained to the principal directly.

“The tanks on the front lawn, that upset them too, so the committee decided to take this different direction,” she added.

I’m okay with a no guns no tanks policy at schools, even if it eliminates a tactile learning experience. I can’t imagine that holding a weapon actually improves one’s understanding of the horrors of war or the need to do all we can to avoid war in the future. And there’s certainly no justification for upsetting students who have already witnessed real-live war.

This seems like little more than a flounce by history teacher Gene Michaud. He’d assembled a program that fit his preferences and once the rest of the school decided that changes needed to be made, he took his guns and went home - ever the model of professionalism in teaching.

UPDATE: I received the following email on this topic, and I thought it only fair to share:

I have known Gene Michaud for many years. He is a dedicated intelligent teacher who has employed actual action to help student understand what war is about. First there were no tanks in the yard, the kids were not pointing rifles at passing cars and according to my receptionist his classes were very popular with her two children. But I imagine it does  not suit you style which seems zzzzzzzzzzzz

Well, I don’t recall anyone suggesting that kids were pointing rifles at passing cars, but I’m certainly glad it wasn’t happening.

Mr. Michaud may have been a dedicated teacher and may be a dedicated teacher for the rest of his career, but according to the (sympathetic) story, he flounced when he wasn’t allowed to bring guns into a school. I’m sorry if that doesn’t jibe with the third-hand anecdotes of two students, but you’d think he might have wanted to set the record straight if the story was so incorrect.

And by the way, if anyone can explain to me what a style of “zzzzzzzzzzzz” means, I’d greatly appreciate it.

I understand these regulations. Many schools have children who can not afford to buy costumes. This makes the celebration an obvious demonstration of greedy one-up-manship that is not conducive to schooling.

To the parents that do not like these policies, I say: Too bad. Go to a different school or take your kids out of school all together.

Sometime in 2012, I will begin the ninth year of my life under an FBI gag order, which began when I received what is known as a national security letter at the small Internet service provider I owned. On that day in 2004 (the exact date is redacted from court papers, so I can’t reveal it), an FBI agent came to my office and handed me a letter. It demanded that I turn over information about one of my clients and forbade me from telling “any person” that the government had approached me.

…

In 2004, it wasn’t at all clear whether the FBI would charge me with a crime for telling the ACLU about the letter, or for telling the court clerk about it when I filed my lawsuit as “John Doe.” I was unable to tell my family, friends, colleagues or my company’s clients, and I had to lie about where I was going when I visited my attorneys. During that time my father was battling cancer and, in 2008, he succumbed to his illness. I was never able to tell him what I was going through.

Government agencies will always be able to dig up excuses as to why they don’t have to behave as if they function in a liberal democracy and why they don’t actually have to serve the very public they were created to serve. Instead, we will continue to see traces of these organizations doing everything they can to evade scrutiny as they insinuate themselves into our lives.

Peter Schiff: How to silence an economist: Ask him a question about the economy.

“Those who are protesting the rise of the corporate state are, in fact, on a political spectrum, the true conservatives because they are calling for the restoration of the rule of law.”

“This sounds like Fox News.”

At the end of the interview, the host thanks him for joining them and Hedges throws off his earphone with a final well-deserved jab: “It will be the last time.”

I rarely pay attention to the CBC but what a shame that their actors have alienated a very intelligent and responsible journalist.

“We have had a strain of hostility to free enterprise – and frankly, a strain of hostility to classic America – starting in our academic institutions and spreading across this country,” said Gingrich, who is also seeking the Republican nomination.

Herman Cain does not seem any brighter:

For his part, Cain also dubbed the protests anti-capitalist and said demonstrators would be better served targeting the White House.
“I don’t have a lot of patience for people who want to protest the success of somebody else,” Cain said.

Both clowns need basic lessons in economics and politics.

First of all, the Western economies are not free enterprise. If the economies were free enterprise, the parasitic 1% elite would be working with the rest of the 99% of the population instead of living off of government privilege. It is precisely the non-free enterprise machinations which are the cause of the economic instability and the unfair distribution of wealth. It is not “the success of somebody else” that is being targeted but rather it is the unfair success and the special privileges afforded to crony-capitalists that are being targeted.

Second, targeting the White House is probably the single most arrogant recommendation that any American politician can make. How the hell is anybody supposed do that? while going to work everyday to survive? and pay the taxes to fund the parasitic elite? That is the problem: nobody can make any positive change in the White House. Those two old birds could not do it themselves and they have a hell of a lot more time on their hands than the average person!

CAVEAT: Personally, I do not care much one way or the other. I am not afraid of eating GMO foods. However, I have severe objections to the nature of their business model such that, if I had my druthers, the GMO market would not likely exit. In simple terms, I do not believe in patenting anything much less organisms but that is an argument for a different day.

Unlike the super-natural foods crowd, I doubt that the general public will care if this ballot initiative is adopted. People will pick up a package, read GMO on the label, compare prices and keep buying the same old junk. Initially, the mandatory labelling will have the opposite effect of a death blow. Rather than rejecting GMOs because of safety concerns, people will have less fear of GMOs after learning how much of them they have been eating all along!

Regardless of where you fall on the politics of this issue, I think it is only responsible to ask why it is that GMO labelling is not already happening voluntarily. If GMOs are a good thing, why not let it be known? I think the reason GMO labelling is not already pervasive is because the general public would be horrified to know that big business has such a stranglehold on the agricultural market. If there is going to be a death blow to the GMO industry, it will arise from the public revolting against so much control over nature and God’s bounty — not because people think GMOs are dangerous.

Let me be clear. I fully appreciate that drug abuse is first and foremost a health problem more than anything else followed by a safety problem. Lastly, drug abuse is a legal problem. I start off with this disclaimer because I firmly believe that the reason political camps lock horns over drug abuse policy is due to ignorance. A lot of people in the anti-drug camp have no idea how people get addicted to hard drugs.

I also want to be clear in stating that I believe in the decriminalization of all drugs without exception. There is no doubt in my mind that the police state creates the drug problem. Prohibition makes procurement of the drugs risky, expensive and thus profitable. The profitability and the danger of selling drugs would not exist if the police were not part of the drug market. This fact alone makes me shake my head at the conservatives. How can they be so blind? Their nonsense law and order attitude is the source of the problem — forget about the hypocrisy of dirty cops making matters worse.

Having said that, I hope it is obvious that I believe people should be free to do whatever they want and pay their own consequences. That includes activities that I personally believe are self-destructive. It is just not for me to tell them what to do with their own lives. For that reason alone, I have no qualms with supervized injection sites.

For all I know, these junkies could be looking to gradually wean themselves off of the addiction and a safe injection site can not possibly be worse than the alternative of doing it on the street. A safe injection site could be a gateway for a lonely addict to get help.

My thoughts on this matter made it to a blog post because of this:

In a news conference celebrating the Supreme Court decision to keep the drug-injection facility Insite open, renowned AIDS doctor Julio Montaner opened called for expansion of its services to include the distribution of heroin.

My jaw dropped at how bold this suggestion was but I agree with it. That is freedom. Why not distribute heroin? If people want to take drugs, let them take drugs.

I will be frank. I do not believe these supervised injection sites help much in the long run. I do not care much about the statistics. My gut tells me that supervized injection sites are just a low-responsibility make-work program pushed by people who work in our socialized health care industry. However, it is a step in the right direction to freedom. It is a move towards a free market, if ever we can sense one amid the thick putrifying stench of the state.

In fifty years from now, people will demand privately run opium dens and hookah bars because publicly operated injection sites will not be the best possible experience.

The only problem I see is the funding. I wonder if the conservatives would object to supervised injection sites if they were not funded by the tax-paying public?

The NDP said one of the emails suggests Clement (then federal industry minister) concurred with a local Huntsville official that federal bureaucrats at Infrastructure Canada were getting in the way by conducting a review of planned G8 spending.

The local official wrote to Clement, saying “this is totally unacceptable — I am sure you agree,” according to the email. Clement responded right away, saying, “I agree. I’m working on it.”

People wonder why young kids have no interest in voting. It is pretty hard to blame them when the Tories act like the Libs and the Libs act like the Tories.

“Neither of us will be accused of exaggeration if we acknowledge that the most immediate test confronting us all is to avoid the devastating consequences of a return to global recession,” he said. Governments must commit to cutting their debts and deficits and to resisting protectionism or a recession won’t be avoided, he warned.
In his speech, Cameron issued similar warnings and said Canada and Britain must face this year’s biggest challenge together: securing global economic growth.

This neo-con plee to support government intervention in the economy parallels what I recently encountered from the global climate warming change crowd. Actually, we hear this urgency from them all of the time but a very curious article about a physicist named Ivar Giaever who resigned as a Fellow from the American Physical Society to condemn the group’s official stand on global warming went on to quote from the APS group’s website:

The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.
If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.

Sounds desperate — like the desperation of the neo-cons trying to print more money and expand credit for their own benefit.

I can assume that global warming is occurring. However, the final statement from the APS quote does not logically follow from the preceding statements. The global warming crowd aggressively promotes ethical conclusions based solely on natural facts. That is insane on the face of it and insulting to anybody who understands the nature of science, philosophy and logical reasoning. There is no need to even question the integrity of their research because an ethical conclusion can not be deduced solely from science. These scientists are out of their league when they make policy prescriptions.

Both the neo-cons and the climatologists may be right. I am not sure. One thing of which I am certain is that I do not support the neo-con policy interventions. I thought it was an interesting parallel. I have attacked the hypocrisy of neo-con strategy of printing money many times before. Now, I want to dissect the climatological hysteria.

Why must we reduce emissions?

That is not a rhetorical question. I am not suggesting that emissions are all good. I am just questioning whether the pros of reducing emissions outweight the cons. There is no universally objective reason why we should reduce emissions.

I know this will sound callous and heartless but I do not believe that the responsibility for making these changes are with the general public. Thus, it is unfair to compel the public to finance or accommodate those changes because the underlying premise — i.e., global warming is bad — arguably is false if people are choosing to contribute to the problem. It is through human choice that we can identify what people prefer.

What if global warming is inevitable?

Maybe there is nothing we can do to stop these significant disruptions because maybe the global warming can not be stopped no matter what we do? That is a likely possibility because opponents will delay global warming policy interventions. Enough delays means that the doom and gloom scenario will happen sooner or later.

If global warming is inevitable, efforts to stop global warming would be wasteful. Those efforts would be put to better use if people were re-located to newly temperate parts of the planet.

Proof

Just like the neo-cons, the global warming crowd seriously insist that something must be done now. Not next year. Right now. If you question that urgency, you are treated like an evil demon. God forbid that they should continue to force their agenda — it is actually just a wily scheme to enrich the pocket-books of the elite parasitic rich class but for the sake of argument, we can pretend that their motives are genuine — on all of us, you can bet they will drain every last penny out of us to stop their imaginary apocalypse.

The burden of proof is on the global warming advocates that their policies really do achieve their goals. That is a huge burden. Currently, the climatologists are incapable of predicting the future with any precision nor can they predict the outcome of any preventive measures. Nobody has any idea what temperature changes will occur with any particular policy. Nobody has any idea what to do to hit a target temperature. The science is not mature enough yet to meet that burden of proof.

This will sound callous but I honestly do not believe the majority of the public really cares either. If my perception is right then who are we to insist that everybody does anything about it?

I tell you, I love the comforts and the accessibility of modern technology. I would hate to have grown up with the generation of my parents and I am sure that my children will say the same one day. My parents had to move away from their native land. Had they stayed in their homeland, they would be dead. So, the challenges of people in coastal regions today vis-a-vis the coincidence of global warming are the same that most of our forefathers faced before as did their forefathers before them. People moving away from destitute parts of the world represents the entire history of mankind. Yet, we are leaving them with more material and informational wealth with each passing day.

I keep hearing people say that we should leave the planet to the future generations in the best shape possible. Well, I think we can arguably say that we are doing that in spite of the environmental degradation. In balancing the pros against the cons, I think our choices in life are much greater now than before and that they will be even greater in the future.

Imagine this: One day, there will be a cure for cancer, the development of which was dependent on the same industrial economy that produced this supposedly man-made global warming. Future generations will be cured of cancer in exchange for having a degradation of the coastal regions. Maybe that is a reasonable trade-off for these future people — who knows? By the way, a lot of previously cold barren lands will likely become fertile and habitable. People may be happier and life may possibly be easier with the changes. The science says nothing about how people will judge the changes for themselves.

Imagine now this: one day BEFORE the cure of cancer is found, the industrial economy is stunted by anti-global warming policies and the cancer research institute had to be shut down.

My point is that with so much unknown in the economy and in the field of meteorology, it is foolish to insist that the future will be worse. We have no idea who people will subjectively evaluate their lifestyles.

One thing about global warming and economic interventions that bother me is the moral dissonance. In a culture where an obligation to protect a future person’s survival is not even extended to somebody as real and concrete as an unborn child, there is a bit of a dissonance in policy that demands EVERYBODY has a moral obligation to protect the survival of people who do not even exist.

Oh, well.

If global warming is really a threat worthy of being stopped, then go ahead and keep convincing people of this incontrovertible science but promote interventions in a voluntarist manner. For instance, take the owner of a polluting industrial plant to court. Sue him for dropping soot on neighboring land. Sue him to the point where his only response is to stop operations. Alternatively, buy up industrial plants and then shut them down. Keep doing that. Buy surrounding properties and limit access to the plants.

People should pay for their own charitable campaigns. We generally have the same attitude towards the diversity of religious practice. Dealing with global warming should be no different.

The study, titled Math Instruction that Makes Sense, “demonstrates conclusively that traditional math education methods are superior to the highly ineffective, discovery-based instructional techniques that are in vogue now in educational curricula,” said a news release from the public policy think tank.

There you have it.

Now, get your rotten tomatoes out. You are going to want to toss them at me.

Ready?

I am not convinced that having the entire general population learning all of this mathematics is a good thing. In this day and age of technology, expecting high school graduates to devote their mental capacities to be able to do what can be done instantly with a calculator sounds like a waste of effort and a burning of what little creativity the average high school graduate still possesses.

By way of analogy, we no longer teach kids how to weave wool and knit clothing. Maybe it is time to upgrade our old-fashioned culture of mathematical education to the modern century?

I had a high school teacher who insisted on teaching us how to use a slide-rule, for goodness’ sake! A slide-rule, can you believe it?? Surely we can agree that teaching kids how to resolve or simpifly long arithmetic expressions with a slide-rule is a waste of educational effort? By the same token, I am saying that maybe, just maybe some fat can be trimmed from the old-fashioned mathematical curricula and teaching method.

Thus, conceivably, the poor performance of the discovery-based education in mathematics may not be such a bad thing. Instead of expecting A+++ performance, we may be fine with just an A level of knowledge.

Let us face fact: kids learn stuff fast when they are interested. Once a post-secondary student finds a field of study that interests him, he will learn the math on his own as a means to reach his goal.

For all we know, students from discovery-based teaching are far superior in other skills, namely, discovery. So, they could be far better off than other students in the pursuit and research of their interests.

The fact remains:

“This is gambling,” said ex-federal prosecutor James Montana, now a partner in Chicago’s Vedder Price LLC.

The people who got scammed took a ridiculous chance. They trusted people they did not know and got ripped off. I see no reason why the tax-payer should fund the mediation of a dispute between the loser customers of these online poker games and the owners of these games. The government should stay out of it just like the government should stay out of doping nonsense in professional sports.

I certainly have sympathy for people who got ripped off but they ought to be more prudent with their recreational wasting of money before they are entitled to tax-payer funded justice — assuming such an entitlement could possibly exist. In the grand scheme of things, theses poker losers are low on the totem-pole of people whose money warrants righteous protection.

Justice can be cheap, swift, non-violent and natural. The only weapon that is necessary is information. Once people find out that a particular online game is a scam, the customers will drop it and the scammer will sink rapidly. The poker company knows that and has every interest to make right of any possible or perceived wrongdoing.

Until August, no Fed decision since 1992 had caused as many as three dissents on the policy committee. Economists say the level of disagreement isn’t surprising: It’s far from clear what more, if anything, the Fed should be doing to help lift the economy out of a low-growth, high-unemployment rut.

This dissent would not be news if it was not serious.

Maybe one day, all honest economics classes will teach that printing money does not create wealth.

When I first read about this twisted nonsense today, from every angle, it seemed too absurd even for the anti-welfare crowd. [CAVEAT: I do not believe in welfare mainly because I do not believe in taxation. That is a different story altogether. There is no point me using this opportunity to preach charity.] For an anti-welfare guy myself, I must say that I felt a little sick to my stomach learning that these poor people had to fork out the $30 themselves. I had just come back from grocery shopping and I had spent $60 for the coming week.

Not to get too weird on you all but people on welfare spending their welfare money on drugs does not bother me much at all. Starving them is not going to help. However, putting the boot to drug dealers will help. If the statesmen really honestly wanted to fight The War On Drugs, they could put a stop to it overnight. The police know all of the who, what, where, why and how. It does not stop because there is just too much money to be lost by stopping the drug trade.

A keel-hauling is in order and it has to start from the top. I predict that this stupid mandatory drug testing program will continue to yield 98% drug-free rates but as long as Gov. Scott is in office, the program will never stop. Here is why:

Scott’s sale of the company comes as he attempts to distance himself from repeated conflict-of-interest questions about whether the company he started in 2001 — and hoped to develop into a national chain — would benefit from the aggressive health care changes he wants state lawmakers to approve.

First, I was angry. Now, I am fuming. This is crony-capitalism at its worst. The free marketeers keep demanding less government intrusion in the market place and they are right, as far as I am concerned. The socialists point to this cronyism and say: “See! See! The free market is failing! We have to regulate the market!” but they fail to recognize that we do not live in a free market.

I want a free market. I want the backroom thievery of Rick Scott to stop. I want his pharma-friends to starve. They leach out more corporate welfare than all of the poor welfare recipients combined! The money saved by stopping all of the corporate welfare would make it so that poor people would not need hand outs.

I have to go out and cool off. Hat tip to Jane for bringing attention to this story.

When I pay somebody with legal tender that is any higher than a $20 bill, the first thing they usually do is take a closer look at it to see if it is fake. The hold it up to the Sun. They scan it with blue light. The rub it between their fingers. Somebody even smelled it once. I found out the other day that photocopied $5 bills are becoming very common in tip jars at establishments that usually have dim lighting. That is a pity. Anyway, That is our legal tender for you.

Counterfeit bills appearing in circulation is not the problem with fiat money. The real problem is the central bank increasing the money supply with nothing to back it.

If you pay me with a gold coin, I can test it to see if it is debased too. That may not be easy to do but it can be done. I can weigh it. I can measure its volume. Here is the beauty of using a precious metal: the government debasement of the money supply is on par with the debasement by a common crook. The government just can not hide its debasement the money supply.

Where Roubini is being disingenuous is by omitting the fact that people were forced to accept the King’s debased gold. Such extreme coercion can not happen today with debased metal.

The other good thing about precious metals is that it costs money to extract them. So, a person who wants to increase his wealth has a choice: dig or get a job and trade. It just makes no economic sense to fear an inflation of the gold supply.

One more thing about the monetization of precious metals is that nobody holds a monopoly upon what precious metals people will accept. Currencies will compete. Some people will trade gold. Other people will trade silver or whatever else.

Does that mean people will walk around carrying bags of gold in their pockets? No. They will keep using their plastic cards and trade private notes. However, at the end of the day or week or month, they will likely walk into their bank branch and demand to see their bars of gold in the vault to make sure there is no funny business going on. Heck, private vaults will probably spring up on the market to compete with banks!

But I don’t get stabbing your fiscal stability in the neck.

If you do a quick search of The Politic (the search box is down at the bottom of the right hand column), you’ll see that I have a beef with the idea of a harmonized sales tax. I don’t like the fact that it conceals the source of each part of the tax (though this could be alleviated by having retailers display the taxes separately while keeping all the other wonderful aspects of the HST), but c’mon man, that’s no reason to throw a tantrum when Gordon Campbell dupes you (and I know about tantrums, though my three-year-old is more reasonable when I tell she can’t have a chocolate cookie).

Consumption taxes are good. They’re less distortionary than so many other taxes. They reduce transaction costs. And if you build in the right mechanisms, they’re a hella lot more fair. And, oh yeah, the B.C. HST did that. The reach of the sales tax was, arguably, further reaching than your beloved PST, but the rebates (read: money in your pocket) that would be issued would out-weigh the inconvenience of having to pay more at the cash.

But I get it. The Liberals went about the wrong way, and you just hate it when politicians lie to you. Of course, you don’t seem to mind when Bill Vander Zalm lies to you (though, if that’s the worst thing he’s ever done…), but at least he lets you get some self-righteous populous rage on. Not like those darned elites pretending like they know better than you… oh, wait.

And that’s the point, right? Fiscal sensibility, balanced budgets, economic security, a simplified and fair tax code… that’s all meaningless compared to sticking it to the man. Bra-vo.

So, do you realize how much you’re in the hole for? Did you really think about what will have to be done to switch back to your archaic, sentimental PST? Do you realize you owe the rest of us 1.6 freakin’ Billion dollars? It was mentioned on Twitter that 1.6 million people voted in this act of grandstanding referendum, so that’s $1000 per vote that you owe us.

And to the BC NDP and its supporters, what on earth have you done? Sure, the federal NDP recently ran a fiscally irresponsible campaign, but, damn, if thye didn’t build up the NDP brand like no one else. I think they actually made people forget what ruinous policies the NDP actually stands for. But you wouldn’t let that spoil your fun. The Liberals needed to suffer and you needed to prove your economic illiteracy. Are you, in fact, blind to the reality that you need to expand your tax base to fund all the goodies you want to buy? Do you not realize that the HST was, on balance, a fairer and more efficient way to achieve that?

And to BC voters, do you feel good? Are reveling in the pain Gordon Campbell is, no doubt, feeling as parades around London? Do you think that everything will just be fine, because you’ve slain the bogeyman that is the overbearing elites? Do you actually understand what you’ve done? No matter how good it feels to rebuke the public servants who think so little of you, you have just dealt a major blow to the province that, I assume, you love so dear.

So, yeah, that big ol’ middle finger you thrust in the face of the ruling Liberal party, you just shoved it in your own eye.

Soweto alone had more cars, taxis, schools, churches and sport facilities than most independent countries in Africa. The Blacks of South Africa had more private vehicles than the entire white population of the USSR at the time.

Today Soweto has modern shopping malls like, Dobsonville Shopping Centre. In 2005 the Protea Gardens Mall opened. This was followed by the Baramall Shopping Centre and the Jabulani Shopping complex and the Maponya Mall. Experts say that Soweto has as much as 25% oversupply of retail space.

— like, these are all universally good things?

So what if they have all the toys, the jobs, the schools and the playgrounds? This insane outlook from Chris Kritzinger seems to assume the unknowable. Namely:
1) the black people could not have done the exact same things for themselves
2) all of the black people want all of this stuff
3) forcing natives to conform to a western lifestyle of trinkets and gadgets is good
4) trinkets and gadgets are enough to ignore the hardship, misery and out-right theft endured by black South Africans
5) maybe the black people would be happy enough with the peace of being left alone all these years even without trinkets

This demonic idea that Blacks should be grateful to the Whites deserves to be smothered. It is insane. It is cruel. It is selfish. It is wrong.

I still don’t have strong feelings about it, but, all in all, I think this was the right move. Right now, his impact on the nation cannot be questioned. There is wide-spread mourning, and it seems many Canadians felt a sort of connection to the man. A state funeral is quite appropriate.

“J’en appelle aujourd’hui à une désobéissance civile”, déclare-t-il à France 24. “Je voudrais dire aux femmes de ne pas avoir peur de sortir voilée intégralement. En payant leurs contraventions, je neutralise la loi. Je veux montrer qu’elle ne fonctionne pas, que c’est un échec pour les acteurs politiques qui l’ont promulguée.”

— Rachid Nekkaz, 38 years old, real-estate businessman in Paris.

Neither individuals nor nations can dig themselves out of debt by plunging further into it. And you don’t encourage workers to work harder by punishing their efforts with higher tax brackets.

Sounds good, right? The only problem is that Jim Flaherty and Mark Carney have been demanding an increase in credit and monetary expansion for the past few years. They are getting it too. The Conservatives are not following what Stockwell Day is suggesting.

I know. Conservatives will just say that they are following a balanced approach but that is nonsense. The Bank of Canada sustaining interest rates near zero is just a devious way to slowly redistribute wealth from the working class to the parasitic elite without anybody noticing.