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The Moral Case for Supervillainy

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Yoshida) — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 00:39:00 -0700

(The following is an extended excerpt from something I'm working on - kind of a Galt speech for a character. Basic concept - a real life sort of "Bond Villain" who runs an 'evil' corporation that tries to overthrown foreign governments and the like for profit and that is building a SuperWeapon on its island. What I think of this really depends on my mood). The Moral Case for Supervillainy I want to tell you the story of my Grandfather. I didn’t know him personally very well - he died when I was young and, even when I knew him, he was an exhausted old man. But I know his story very well indeed. When he was thirty-four, because he happened to have ancestors born in Japan, the government came along and took everything that he had in the world. They took everything that he owned - and everything that his family owned. Fishing boats and farms. Furniture and homes. They took it all. And then they put him in jail. But, through all of that, somehow he never lost his faith. He was never overcome by the desire to sit in place and die. When the war was over, they let him and his young family out. They left them penniless, destitute, and in the middle of nowhere. So, my Grandfather started walking. He wasn’t legally allowed back on the West Coast yet However, fishing was his vocation and he could hardly do it from Alberta. So he left my Grandmother and my Uncle in an abandoned shack and made the trek on home. And so he went to work. He worked damned hard every day that he lived. And he built something again. Day-by-day he worked until he was able to buy a house in Vancouver for his growing family. Himself, my Grandmother, my Uncle, my Aunt, and my Dad. Then someone murdered my Uncle. He was just a child. Not even ten years old. The oldest boy. Someone murdered him. We don’t know who - even more than half a century later. But one day his oldest boy was just gone. They found him floating in a pool. And my Grandparents blamed themselves - they seemed foreign, they thought. It had made them a target. So they went back to work, now working even harder to fit in - to be model members of the community. They all worked for decades more. Joined by another boy, they worked on the boats and they worked in the canneries. And I really think that the struggle - that all of those burdens - broke the man’s health. By the time I knew him, he had retreated into himself - sitting and watching Japanese soap operas and meticulously recording all of them on the early VCR that my Dad and my uncle had purchased for him as a retirement gift. Why, I don’t know - my strongest memory of his home was that he had cabinets and cabinets full of video tapes. That home - that was the reward for all of his years of work. He bought it. He owned it. That was the financial legacy he had to pass on. And what a legacy! First, of course, it went to my Grandmother. My Aunt and her daughter lived there as well. In the overheated real estate market that prevailed by the time my Grandmother passed on it was worth the better part of a million dollars. I remember when he died - almost twenty years ago now - he spoke of the opportunities that he wanted me, the oldest Grandson, to have. But it was not to be. After my Grandmother’s death, we discovered that my Aunt had managed to have the house - the only real asset of the estate - transferred into her name at some point in the past. And there was nothing that could be done at that point to challenge that, the period for having done so long since passed. My Aunt, who had never held a steady job in her life and who raised a wild and worthless delinquent of a daughter, had taken the whole thing. Then she lost all of it - blowing through the money and then some on cars, fancy vacations, and unwise real estate purchases. In the end all that my Grandfather passed on to me was his own unbreakable will. Though, I wonder, to what end? After all, what lesson is there to be drawn from this story other than that sometimes, when you’re down, if you look up with hope in your eyes the universe will kick you in the face, put a boot into your back, and then take a piss on you? More broadly, the lesson to be learned here - the lesson I have taken away and I wish to impart upon you - is that the weak will take every opportunity to prey upon the strong. After all, it was the weak - weak and pathetic people - who bought the stolen property of the Japanese. Note here, the people who bought it were not strong enough to take it themselves, or to acquire it of their own will. Instead, they sought the intervention of some higher authority who then gave it to them. And it was the weak and pathetic - my Aunt - who destroyed so much of what my Grandfather had built. In our society, the demands of the weak - who will die useless, unloved, and unremembered by history - have been repeatedly allowed to carry the day over the needs of the strong. This is the most glaring disadvantage of an egalitarian and democratic society - in a world of “one person, one vote” - the voices of ten worthless peons such as my Aunt, who will make no mark on history and no contribution to humanity, civilization, or the world beyond the unproductive consumption of resources, are worth ten times that of one great man. And so we have a political class and economic system that is increasingly tilted towards pandering to the whims of the unworthy many over the requirements of the productive few. And in a similar way, so was the next generation and the one after that victimized. My father grew to become a Banker. And he was, I am not ashamed to admit, well-compensated for his services. Or, at least he was in theory. Except he was earning money in a time where socialism, both overt and covert, had come to hold sway over the halls of government. And, during his prime earning years - and my own formative years - he was saddled with a ruinous rate of income taxation that topped out at 54% at barely more than $70,000. Why was this? Were the years of my youth those of some great national or international emergency? No. It was because the political class, beholden to the whims of the parasitic money, decided that my family deserves to have less and others who did no work to earn it deserved to have more. I remember, and this is an indignity that burns to the present day, how during some of those years - in order to maintain just a simple Middle Class lifestyle while saving for the future - my Mother had to take menial jobs. I remember having to spend my days, while my friends were off enjoying their youths, helping her to deliver phone books. Phone books, ladies and gentlemen, because that was the state that socialism had left our economy in and because that was what was necessary to pay for the things that a Middle Class existence required. I think of that, and a fire within me burns. I remember how I lost out on things - important things - because I spent my weekends delivering newspapers in order to buy things that other people were just given. I remember how, in High School, I missed so much because I was working night shifts at a Safeway while my contemporaries were off being teenagers. And I’m sure that, if you are listening to my message, that you have memories of you own that you would like to share. Of how you may feel victimized by a society that seems to irrationally demand that some of its members work significantly harder than others and give so much more of themselves in the service of ungrateful masses. Yet, ladies and gentlemen, for all that you may feel you and I and everyone like us may feel the victim here, the truth is that you, me, my Mother, my Father, my Grandfather - all of us - we share in the guilt for all that has passed. We share in it because we have, for far too long, been the passive enablers of our own exploitation. Far too few of us have dared to stand athwart history, shouting stop. We have, like so many victims of abuse, meekly accepted the established order as just and eternal. But it is not just. I know it. You know it. Even the huddled and parasitic masses know it. It is not just and it cannot and it will not stand. “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but in ourselves.” That, my friends, is true today as it was true then. All of us have, for far too long, been willing to accept a system that binds over the talented with chains of servitude. We have been too willing to accept moral, economic, and political constraints which serve no purpose other than to conscript us into the service of those whose lives will be little noted nor long remembered. In the natural world, the weak will submit to the leadership of the strong because it is necessary for their own survival. However, as we have been removed progressively further away from all evolutionary imperatives we have increasingly created a society wherein the strong, creative, and intelligent minority is made the keeper of the majority. Increasingly we have created a society where the labour of a productive few is expected to support a vast parasitic class that is sapping our will and resources. What the proponents of this system fail to recognize is that it is unsustainable in the long term. The incentives for the productive to cease to use their talents and instead depend upon others to provide for them are very strong. And so it is that we increasingly find ourselves living in a land of men who are not truly men in any sense of the word. Men who cannot provide for themselves or be counted upon to defend our civilization, their families, or even themselves. Young men who are a burden, and not a blessing, upon our country and our economy. And our enemies - and we still have many enemies in the world - watch this great hollowing-out with alacrity and interest. Consider, all of you, how much of your money goes and will continue to go in the future, to provide for the extended retirements and extremely long lives of people who contributed nothing to any of the rest of us. And consider not only the better uses that you could put that money to, but how those better uses might actually advance the human race as a whole rather than merely ensuring that some people may continue to consume oxygen. Think of that. Or, think of this: if you’re a relatively young person working full-time at a professional job, you probably have the exact same (or less) disposable income than some random person going through an extended adolescence at home. In fact, in their infinite wisdom, through various tax credits and subsidies, wealth is probably more or less directly being transferred from yourself to that individual. Imagine - if you are a young person today and the present system is allowed to prevail, then you are going to probably pay ruinous taxes for most if not all of your life to support the long and indolent retirement of a generation that squandered almost everything that their parents passed on to them and, in many cases, spent the years that they should have been raising our generation on various pseudo-adolescent exercises in “self-discovery.” In short, my friends, if you play by the rules then the system is going to screw you time and time again. Some people will tell you that this is a selfish creed. That’s nothing more than projection. What could be more selfish than demanding that other people live their lives an offer of themselves on behalf of others, only to then berate and demand more of those people? We are rapidly approaching a moment where we will have to make a choice about our own survival. If we continue to allow those around us to insist upon such an ahistorical social and economic system - with the best and the brightest being weighed down by anchors of indolent uselessness - we shall all drown. Because, ladies and gentlemen, the math is not in our favour. Not only will more people retire with each passing day, but also the advance of technology will increasingly render more and more people with no aptitude for anything beyond manual and closely-directed labour - economically obsolete. Like the starving mobs of old, these people will consume our resources, our reserves, and - when all of that is gone - the seed grain as well. Unless we can find the will to assert ourselves we shall find ourselves the victims of increasingly-onerous burdens of taxation and regulation and then, when even those shall fail to meet the demands of the mob, we shall likely be faced with ever-more odious measures such as demands for rationing, conscripted labour, and the forced seizure of wealth. If we take it, as we have in the past, then the universe will curb-stomp us. You know, I think that supervillians have gotten a bad rap over the years. Sure, some of them may have unwise and maniacal plans to poison cities for sport or to steal the British Crown Jewels but there are many others whose actions were nothing more than a reaction to a society that never valued or allowed them to claim an adequate reward for their talents and labour while, at the same time, demanding that those talents and that labour be turned to the use of ungrateful and undeserving others. All that many of them are guilty of is defying a society that doesn’t value them in the first place. We should keep them in mind as we learn to fight back. We should do so because most supervillians have one key feature in common: they have liberated themselves from the collective sense of guilt which demands that those of ability ought to allow themselves to be conscripted to the service of others. Going forward we must remember, as they already do, that we are not seeking to take anything from others that rightfully belongs to them, but that we are merely seeking to serve our own desires and our own interests and that, in so doing, we are doing nothing wrong. After all, what are the masses we are supposedly called to serve doing if it is not that? I, for one, tire of the argument that a society should be judged by the least among it. I do not know if there were any groups among the earliest humans who felt that way because, if there were, they all surely perished during the early years of man somewhere in Africa. It is the strong, the bold, the creative, and the brave who mark a civilization in the pages of history. Let us now join together to do what we know in our hearts is morally right: to refuse to be the guardians of a society that demands that we provide of ourselves that others may enjoy things that we cannot have. Let us recognize that the below-average cannot hope to save our civilization from destruction. Only we can do that and we will not do it if we are bound over and our resources devoted to those who cannot possibly assist. Let not our efforts be ultimately unrewarded. The epitaph of our civilization must be something more than, “they meant well.”

The Revolution of ’10 and Onwards

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Yoshida) — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 10:28:00 -0800

My first thought on seeing Scott Brown elected to the United States Senate - to fill a seat that was last held by a Republican during the Truman Administration - was of Churchill’s reported reaction to Pearl Harbor. “So,” he thought, “we had won after all.”

The decisive blow to the Democratic agenda, coming one day short of a year from when Barack Obama took office, also brought to mind Churchill on the balcony of the Ministry of Health in May 1945. “This is your victory,” he told the crowd. And so it is today. To everyone who never gave up on the American spirit, to those who never surrendered, to those who were undaunted by the odds and the ceaseless and merciless attacks of the enemy: this is your victory. It is the victory of the American people and of all of the people, wherever they might be, who must have freedom and know the price that must be paid that it may be preserved.

But, having quoted certain words of Churchill, some others seem appropriate. “This is not the end. This is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Hubris, that age-old enemy of the victorious, led the Democrats into error. They advanced on too broad a front, without a plan for victory. They thought that we were defeated and that many of us would be passive and weak. They thought wrong. Our line held. But the war is not finished yet.

At Marathon, the Athenians, fighting against incredible odds, stopped the Persian army cold. However, as soon as the battle was concluded the exhausted Greek soldiers had to rush back to Athens to thwart a Persian attempt to take the city by sea. Likewise, we must be increasingly on the alert for the inevitable Democratic effort to use their remaining forces to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

The real danger is not that the Democrats will now force the Senate bill through the House. Nor is it that they will delay the seating of Senator Brown. Personally, I would welcome either development as they would likely fail in either and, in any case, they would be politically suicidal to attempt. No, the danger is that President Obama will take this as an opportunity to pivot politically, put some distance between himself and the Democrats in Congress and perhaps even support those elements among both Democratic caucuses who would like to see new Congressional leadership. Remember: President Clinton was re-elected two years after the Republicans took control of the Congress. Victory now emphatically does not guarantee victory later.

In 1950, General MacArthur nearly won the Korean War by forcing a landing behind enemy lines at Inchon. The North Koreans were routed and their army was almost-totally destroyed in the battles that followed as the UN forces broke out from the Pusan perimeter. However, as they approached the Yalu River, half a million Red Chinese soldiers joined the fight and suddenly the Allies were faced with what MacArthur described as, “an entirely new war.”

What we learned last night was simple enough: Obama cannot and will not be re-elected if he runs on the issues that he’s highlighted and pushed over the last year. He can be - and he will be - however if he now pivots and draws Republicans into a series of the same sort of overreaches and punches into the air as Clinton did in 1995-1996 and, for that matter, has has happened to the Democrats over the last year.

We must internalize the lessons of the last few elections - and act upon them.

First, the American people are looking for change. They’ve repeatedly voted for it and they haven’t gotten it yet.

Second, the change that they are looking for is non-ideological, at least in the sense that the people who are swinging these elections are not voting based on ideology but rather on what they think might work.

Third, there is a widespread feeling of general disgust for the political class as a whole that is rather unlike anything that we’ve seen in our lifetimes - at least in America.

Fourth, Americans are willing to sacrifice if the reasons for those sacrifices - and the rewards that may come from them - are explained clearly and honestly.

I, for one, suggest that Republicans look abroad for inspiration. Specifically, I would suggest that they study the course of three Provincial Governments in my native Canada: Alberta in 1993, Ontario in 1995, and British Columbia in 2001.

Each of those provinces elected a new government (or re-elected an old one with a new leader, in the case of Alberta) that came into office promising a fairly radical reduction in the size of government. Each, with varying degrees of success, came to office and slashed government services, cut taxes, and cut spending. Each of them was re-elected. In Canada.

This was because voters, like I believe American voters do now, recognized that their governments were too large and too expensive. It wasn’t, for many voters (who, in two cases, had just previously voted to put admitted socialists into government a few years earlier) a debate about theory, it was a reality-based discussion. It’s easy to get lost - and to lose the debate - when you’re arguing the theoretical merits of smaller versus bigger government, especially since the liberals have pretty much all of the emotional cards in the deck sitting in their hand. It’s easy to win the argument that, “we cannot afford it” when you have high taxes, a stagnant economy, and massive deficits to cite.

The moral case against big government is hard to sell to a lot of voters. The practical case practically sells itself.

Second, in each of these places, conservatives were able to win office by making a good-government argument. They argued that they would be better managers of those government programs that voters liked than their opponents would. This should be the core of a winning Republican message for 2010 and beyond: government should do fewer things overall but, those things that government should do, it should be the best in the world at.

Run against government itself, and Obama can take up the mantle of the defense of downtrodden, etc, etc - rally his base - and maybe be narrowly re-elected against an unappealing Republican opponent in 2012. Obama can pivot from his current position and launch counter-attacks against “uncaring” Republicans and so forth. You want to freeze him.

Attack his base. Part of all of the campaigns that I cited above was widespread disgust at the antics of public-sector workers. Forget attacks on “welfare queens” and the like - those are yesterday. The welfare Mom with the Cadillac no longer moves voters who don’t already belong to us. The mid-level public servant with a Cadillac and pensions and benefits to match, on the other hand, makes a very compelling public enemy.

Attack the “community organizers” - who Obama can’t abandon. People don’t get, except in the abstract, Trillions of dollars. Let’s comb through the Federal budget and attack every single “community organization” that’s collecting tax dollars and gives us an opening. Those people won’t vote for us anyways and they’re Obama’s base - he can’t abandon them, no matter how nuts and repellant they appear to the public as a whole.

The battle is begun, but now the hard part begins. Today is a great day, but there will be trying days ahead.

Conan O'Brien: Simpsons Showrunner?

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Yoshida) — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 23:09:00 -0800

NBC President Jeff Zucker is reportedly threatening that, if Conan O’Brien leaves NBC, he will enforce a non-compete clause in his contract that will keep Conan off the air for three to five years.

Now I, personally, have never been a particular fan of O’Brien’s late-night show. What I am a gigantic fan of, however, is his work as a writer-producer on The Simpsons. He has the writing credit for exactly two episodes - both of which were masterpieces.

The first, Marge versus the Monorail is the story of Springfield’s ill-fated adventure in mass transit and features the famous “Monorail Song.”

The second, Homer Goes to College, is a perfect example of why I’ve been watching The Simpsons for twenty years. As a kid, I loved it for it’s silly jokes about college pranks and Richard Nixon. These days I love it for it’s underlying premise that, in O’Brien’s words, Homer is too stupid to understand the difference between reality and “bad Animal House knock off movies.”

So, if NBC does keep O’Brien from hosting another late-night show, then I suggest that Fox step in and offer him the chance to be the showrunner on The Simpsons. (Well, a Google search reveals that Cracked beat me to the idea, but yeah) I like Al Jean but, really, he’s been at it for a long time and might even welcome a berth somewhere up the the line. If Fox will do this I, for one, promise that I’ll be sure to watch their shows live and not fast-forward through the commercials.

Perhaps regrettably, The Simpsons is probably America’s most recognizable modern cultural institution. One need not pause for long to discuss the sad decline in the quality of that show over the last decade or so. It’s tough to say what exactly went wrong - whether it was the subtle influence of Fox’s other, cruder shows, whether everything that can be done has been done, or whether people are just tired of the show. Whatever it is, pretty much everyone who isn’t actually employed by the series agrees that there’s something wrong.

It is mostly residual affection for the early days that keeps me watching (when I think about it closely, I can see some far-off day in the future where the Simpson family walks off into a sunset, the soft version of the theme playing, while I shed a tear). But Conan could make them relevant - and great - again.

Not only would, I am sure, Conan be able to contribute some truly great material, but his presence might well allow the show to both attract back the talent that has gone elsewhere (if you look at some of the other great material being done in animation, the odds are that the creative force behind it will have some connection to The Simpsons) but also to draw top-shelf creative talent from other shows. What comedy writer, anywhere in the world, whether a Simpsons veteran or not would not want a chance to write for Conan O’Brien’s Simpsons?

Why not, Conan? What greater work have you, sir? After all, you’ve been doing the late-night TV thing for the better part of two decades now - and you’ve hosted the show to host in that realm. NBC has sealed their fate anyways.

Besides, think of it this way, the way things are sliding if you wait out the five years somewhere else, by the time you get back on television you’ll probably be allowed to scream obscenities live on the air.

And why not, Fox? The move might do more than simply give you a chance to return the show to it’s former glory - it would also give you the chance to get O’Brien under contract with terms that would allow him, once whatever legal entanglements he’s sure to have with NBC get sorted out, to finally launch you into the waters of late-night entertainment. Indeed, even if his non-compete officially keeps him off the air for half a decade, the likely end result of the criss-crossing web of lawsuits that is likely to result from this mess is a settlement that releases him from his contract somehow.

And, if they have compelling reasons to get behind the concept, I put it to you that all of us have a better reason: the man can make us laugh, one way or another.

Obama Appointee, Coakley Aide, Shoves Reporter

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Yoshida) — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 19:05:00 -0800

The scene in Washington, DC last night was ugly for Democrats in every possible way. The Senate race in Massachusetts is one that, quite simply, there’s no way in hell should even be competitive, let alone seemingly winnable for the GOP. The Democrats have found themselves in a perfect storm of failure there: a terrible national political climate, a faltering economy, an incompetent and unexciting candidate, and a Republican with a genuinely exciting personal story and an ideological profile that might bring him victory in the Bay State. Plus, of course, I think that everyone recognizes that it would be cosmically ironic if it was the seat made vacant by Ted Kennedy’s death that sunk health care reform. So one can understand why the Democrats are under pressure.

In view of all of that, one can understand why a Democratic aide would want to shove a Weekly Standard reporter asking about Attorney General Martha Coakley’s “there are no terrorists in Afghanistan” gaffe to the ground.

Following a fundraiser in Washington, DC last night (an excellent example, for what it’s worth, of the ineptitude of the Democratic campaign. One assumes that it was scheduled some time ago, a week before what was to be her coronation as Senator and they didn’t see a way of backing out of it at this point without being seen as on the defensive, even though it meant losing a vital night of campaigning in the final week of a down-to-the-wire race), Weekly Standard reporter John McCormack approached to ask his question and was ignored by Coakley.

At this point, Michael Meehan, a Democratic staffer and Obama Appointee, approached McCormack and shoved him to the ground. McCormack’s suit pants were apparently a casualty of the incident.

The first couple of videos I saw of the incident weren’t terribly clear. Frankly, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the whole thing. Then, this afternoon, I saw this longer view of the affair.

However, it passes so quickly, that I wasn’t quite able to see what exactly had transpired until I downloaded the video and watched it blown up and slowed down. I hope that the creator of the video won’t mind that I’ve done the same thing for everyone else.

To review what’s in the video, this is the sequence of events:

First, McCormack approaches Coakley to press his question about her latest gaffe.

Second, Meehan approaches McCormack and makes physical contact with him.

Third, McCormack goes to the ground.

At this point, Meehan states, he helped McCormack up. I will grant this - you can clearly see on the video that he does this. However, in so doing, he maneuvers himself into a position to stop McCormack from continuing to approach Coakley. The body language does not appear to be remotely friendly.

As to whether that’s appropriate behavior for a White House appointee and a senior Democratic aide - well, I’ll leave that up to you. I’ll simply state that, were I McCormack under these conditions, I would file a police report alleging that an assault had occurred.

Minority of Canadians Opposed to Prorogation: Poll

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Yoshida) — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 18:43:00 -0800

I love how ridiculously slanted this CBC story on polling numbers related to the prorogation of Parliament is.

First, we begin with the headline. They can't say "majority opposes prorogation of Parliament", since that's not supported by the facts in the story. So, they come at it from the opposite direction, noting that there's "little support" for the decision, which is relatively unremarkable since it's probably fair to say (indeed, quite fair to say) that something approaching a majority (and I would argue an actual majority) have no idea what's actually going on.

The poll obviously didn't give them the number they wanted - majority opposition the decision - so instead they use weasel math to give them numbers that sound impressive that aren't. Here are the two key numbers they use:

67% of voters are at least "somewhat aware" of the decision to prorogue Parliament.

Of that 67% who are at least "somewhat aware", 58% oppose the decision to to some degree.

In other words, of the polling sample as a whole 38.86% of Canadians oppose the decision. To dig even deeper into the internals of the poll, 40% of those in the 67% who are aware of the decision are "strongly opposed."

So, of Canadians as a whole, 26.8% are "strongly opposed" to the decision. That number, it should be noted, is pretty much an exact match for the percentage of Canadians who voted for the Liberals in the last election - and an awful lot lower than the 62.35% that voted for parties other than the Conservatives (a point I've made before and I'll make again, I am sure).

Not only does a majority of the electorate either support or not care about the prorogation, but the point cannot be made often enough that it's not necessary (or even, in my opinion, desirable) under the present conditions for the Conservatives to be making decisions that win the favour of a majority of the electorate - if the Tories govern in such a way as to win the approval of 40% of Canadians they can be in government pretty much indefinitely.

The Massachusetts Miracle

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Yoshida) — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 01:53:00 -0800

Rarely has history delivered to us an opportunity as sweet as the one that now lies before us. The election of Scott Brown to represent the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States Senate would represent the most comprehensive rejection imaginable of the abomination that the Democratic Party is attempting to force down the throats of the American people. Imagine: the only state that voted for McGovern could vote to send a Republican to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat. Yes, we can.

Public Policy Polling, in a brand new poll out today, has Brown - presently one of the handful of Republicans in the Massachusetts State Senate - in the lead by a single point. Earlier this week, a poll from Rasmussen showed Brown trailing his Democratic opponent, State Attorney General Martha Coakley, by nine. Again - this is in Massachusetts.

A victory by Scott Brown next Tuesday would mark the end of the Democratic health care bill. Make no mistake about it - for all of the talk already swirling around Washington about last-ditch end runs to push through a bill in the event of a Republican victory - there is absolutely no way that you’ll find sixty votes in the Senate or two hundred and eighteen in the House for anything that even remotely resembles the present bill if Massachusetts sends a Republican to the Senate for the first time in thirty-eight years. A GOP victory there would be a political H-Bomb. (Indeed, as with a 1 Megaton warhead, a near-miss here might well be as good as a win).

Consider the practical politics. If we win, we win. And even if we do not, a narrow defeat by Brown might win us a dozen seats in the Congress by inspiring wavering Democratic Congressmen and Senators to call it a career.

The conditions are ripe for a Massachusetts miracle:

Republicans have the right candidate for this race in the form of Scott Brown - a moderate with a proven record of winning in deep blue areas but without, it would seem, a history of attempting to curry favour by blatant appeasement of the left. Brown, a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army National Guard and an attorney, is attractive and has a sort of neighborly appeal that is excellently conveyed in ads that show him touring the state in his truck. He’s a family man with a daughter who was an American Idol semi-finalist.

There’s more to that. This man fights. It takes courage to run for office as a Republican in as fiercely liberal and partisan place as this. When faced with obscene attacks from socially liberal fascists who hurled obscenities at him (and his daughter) for not supporting gay marriage, Brown called out the attackers by name.

Conditions in the state are bleak. If you punch “Massachusetts” into Google the first two suggestions you’ll get, after the state’s motor vehicle branch, are “Massachusetts lottery” and “Massachusetts unemployment.” Democratic Governor Deval Patrick, elected with the help of Obama’s guru David Axelrod using a prototype version of the “hope and change” campaign, has an approval rating of 34%.

More than that, Democrats are saddled with, in the form of Coakley, about as unappealing a candidate as one can imagine. A careerist Democratic hack, her most notable accomplishment, prior to sweeping into the AG’s office on the Democrat ticket, was working to keep an obviously innocent man, convicted of nonsensical charges of “Satanic ritual abuse”, in prison. She’s run a lazy campaign, seemingly hoping to coast into the Senate.

Many Republicans are less-than-eager to engage in this campaign, for fear of being seen to try and fail in a hopeless state. “Why waste money,” they ask, “in a bluest-of-the-blue state where defeat seems certain?”

Well, I put it to you that the chance for a political Inchon is too enticing to pass up. With one deft move we may position ourselves behind the enemy’s lines and roll up their entire position. This may not be the only chance to defeat the Democratic effort to socialize and bankrupt America - but it sure is the cleanest. One shot, one kill and, if we do lose, it’s Massachusetts and no one ever expected that we would win anyways.

So long as brave Republicans - and there are Republicans in Massachusetts - are willing to fight, how can we abandon them? Our brethren are already in the field, why stand we here idle? Consider this: given the anticipated turnout for a Special Election, we could send Scott Brown to the Senate in a landslide if only half of the people in the state who voted for George Bush in 2004 were to turn up and vote.

More than two centuries ago it was a distant relation of mine, Captain John Parker, who commanded the militia at the Battle of Lexington. On his orders the men under his command stood their ground and fired on the British regulars. As America’s spirit of liberty was born in Massachusetts, let it be preserved there as well.

Now is time. Oliver Cromwell once advised, “You must get men of a spirit that are likely to go as far as they will go, or you will be beaten still.” This is apt.

Those of spirit all across the land, all across the world, can assist in this endeavor. The task before us in this war of the secret warriors is to spread the word, as far and as wide as is possible, of what we are doing and what we may achieve. By Facebook, by Twitter, by e-mail, by phone - on the air and in the streets - one by one may we recruit to our banner those willing to stand their ground.

There are those in this world who say that the United States is finished as a world power - that it will be just another country - but together you may yet prove them wrong.

Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Obama’s Stalingrad

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Yoshida) — Wed, 6 Jan 2010 23:20:00 -0800

As we enter the second year of the Obama Presidency, with a castrated health care bill limping towards the finish line, we are left with a vexing question: how did this much-heralded savior, with a super-majority in the Congress, virtually the entire media on his side, overwhelming goodwill overseas, and stratospheric approval ratings fail so quickly and comprehensively?

The Health Care bill may well prove to be Obama’s Stalingrad. His forces having advanced against a disorganized and poorly-led opponent only to discover that the enemy possessed surprising strategic depth. Rather than adjusting to the situation they continue to fight on, wasting resources that might have proven to be the key to victory on other fronts.

That might be a unique way of putting it, but I think that it’s apt and that it goes to a central reason for the failure of the Obama Administration: none of its strategists seem to have the poetry of war in their hearts. By this I mean not merely dreams of military glory, but the deeper understanding of history that allows one to understand the subtle twists of fate that guide the destiny of men. Having brought so much of his campaign team into the White House - people who were politically born on third believing that they hit a triple - Obama appears to lack the valuable counsel in his inner circle of anyone who has truly thought deeply on the lessons of the past.

You might wish to point out to me that the Germans were defeated at Stalingrad and that the bill is likely to pass. Regarding the latter point - we’ll see. As to the former I would suggest to you that the passage of the neutered remnant of the original plan to remake the entire health care system - a plan that raises taxes now, offers no benefits to the middle class, and pays real benefits to a group of people who either don’t vote or mostly vote Democratic already years down the road - is no more a victory than the extraction of some troops from the pocket was one.

Before I return to that thought, we should consider whether it is a fair judgement to describe the Obama Administration, up until this point in time, as a failure? I believe that it is.

In a single year Obama’s approval ratings have fallen farther than those of any other new President. That might be an acceptable loss if he had accrued disapproval while making some sort of structural policy changes that offered the potential for long-term gain, but he has not. At the end of his first year in office the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are still ongoing, Guantanamo Bay is still open, much of the ‘stimulus’ money has already been spent and the economy is still sputtering, GM is still failing, none of his diplomatic initiatives have had any positive effect whatsoever, no new financial regulation has been undertaken, and even his signature health care bill - already shredded by the Congress - has yet to become law. If that is not comprehensive failure, I don’t know what is.

Polls now not only give Obama an average approval rating of lower than 50%, but they also show that a race between him and George W. Bush would be a toss-up. They show him and the much-maligned Sarah Palin in a dead heat. That, given where we were a year ago, is the definition of failure.

Could Obama have wrung a victory out of the last year? Absolutely. If he and his advisors had grasped the opportunity that they had alluded to - a crisis truly being a terrible thing to waste - and had convinced and then executed a strategy for pushing through an agenda while waging war against the Republican Party they absolutely could have won.

First, if they were determined to go with health care as an issue (and, were I a Democrat, I would have), then they should have done it first and presented it as a core economic issue.

They should have begun the campaign for health care reform on or before January 20th.

They should have pitched the health care reform battle in economic terms - with the argument being made that the present health care system is sapping the ability of American companies to compete globally and driving jobs overseas while, at the same time, draining consumers of the money they need to reflate the economy. In a classic sleight-of-hand health care should have been presented as an economic issue.

All of the sob stories didn’t work because, first, most people who want to make public policy based on them are already Democrats and, second, tales of other people’s woes don’t sell when people are worried about themselves. Health care as a means to create jobs, to make business more competitive, and to put more money into your pocket - that’s a message that would have sold a lot better.

Second, they should have used the Obama brand (while it had value) to drive the plan, rather than outsourcing it to the Congress. Leaving the health care plan in the hands of the Democrats in Congress was, frankly, an incredibly stupid decision. Obama should have come out on the first day with a plan that consisted, at its core, of a half dozen simple and easy-to-understand points. Then they should have hammered at those points as the “Obama Plan.” Instead, they let health care turn into a Congressional sausage-making fest - a process that gained them absolutely nothing.

Third, in terms of what was in the plan, they should have swung for the fences. A single-payer plan, or something like it, would offer the most long-term political gain the Democrats because it would massively increase the number of public sector workers and the overall dependence of the population on the government. Also, unlike the present bill, it would be damned hard to undo.

Instead, the Obama people bumbled throughout the year - letting themselves be led rather than leading - finding themselves a year older and without most of their political capital holding the bag for a bill that no one believes is satisfactory. Instead, they found themselves getting drawn into bizarre struggles with Republican political figures that offered them absolutely practical gain. The better part of a year on, does anyone have any idea why the Obama people through it would be a good idea to go to war against Rush Limbaugh?

Does anyone have any good ideas as to the political reasoning that went into the gigantic “Stimulus” bill? They blew the better part of a Trillion dollars to give the economy a jolt that’s going to wear off before the mid-term elections and, in the process, probably ended up costing a number of the people who voted for it their seats.

A smarter approach would have been to break the bill up into a series of regional and sectoral stimulus bills - perhaps at a rate of one a month or so. Not only would this have provided more sustained aid to the economy, but it would also have created the all-important appearance of Obama moving from victory to victory while giving him and Congressional Democrats a chance to pander to various constituencies. At the same time, it would also probably have saved the Democrats some Congressional seats since this approach would allow some members of Congress to vote against all of the wasteful spending while simultaneously voting for those obviously non-wasteful projects that happen to help the people who voted for them.

Rather than move strategically in order to enact their agenda, the Obama people - because their egos were so inflated from their fluke win last November - tried to bluff and bully their way through the thing. They have failed miserably. Obama’s first year in office offered them a rare “unlocked wheel” moment in American politics where they might have shifted the centre of political life far to the left and forced their opponent to reposition or lose all relevance.

Indeed, while Obama’s reign may continue, the threat that he might fundamentally transform the nation is receding as the political calendar moves forward. His first year having passed, this one will be about the Congressional elections, then the next two about his re-election campaign and then, even if he does win in the end, come January 20th, 2013 he’ll be a lame duck.

Anti-Prorogationists and Birthers

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Yoshida) — Tue, 5 Jan 2010 20:21:00 -0800

The largely-irrational fury provoked by the Prime Minister’s decision to prorogue Parliament brings to mind nothing so much as the fevered rantings of those opponents of President Obama who have concocted bizarre conspiracy theories about an alleged Kenyan birth. Don’t get me wrong, I despise the current President as much (and probably much more than) the average conservative, but those people are nuts. Equally so, most of the people on the internet who are responding to the Prime MInister’s decision to prorogue Parliament as though he had forced the Pope to crown him as Emperor Stephen I are, to the clear-eyed observer, on the verge of some strange collective mental breakdown.

Up to the present those rending their garments over it have already invoked the French Revolution and the English Civil War in the promotion of their holy cause. I find it hard to imagine how these people get by in everyday life: people seemingly so ready to launch an insurrection over so minor an issue must be difficult to deal with - prepared as they are to respond to slow service at Starbucks with a re-enactment of the Third Punic War (which, for those of you who happen to have the misfortune to be Liberals, I assure you is not nearly as sexual as it sounds).

Of course, one suppose that it is also possible that they fail to grasp the implications of what they speak. That is, of course, the most fundamental flaw of democracy - the damage that may be wrought by people with just a little bit of information. As I pointed out to someone the other day, the most stunning indictment of the whole practice I can think of is that you just know that, somewhere out there in the United States, someone voted for John Edwards in the belief that America would be aided by having someone capable of communicating with the dead as its leader.

One wonders what the motivating force behind this temper tantrum is. I hear a lot of ranting about how MP’s need to “get back to work” without any specific idea of what that work would be. Are there laws that Liberal MP’s are about to pass? Of course not. I would put it to you, ladies and gentlemen, that legislators are one group of people that we don’t have to have doing work for the sake of work insofar as most legislation tends to restrict individual liberty. If the best reason you can think of to have the House in session is the Afghan detainee matter then I, for one, would rather keep the cash - I, along with the overwhelming majority of Canadians, don’t give a damn about what happened to terrorists at the hands of their own people.

Admittedly, some of it is genuine ignorance. One commentator at the Facebook group against prorogation proposed that MP’s should be paid per law they pass - legislative piece-work. That may be the stupidest idea that I’ve ever heard and I am an avid supporter of the Darwin Awards. The same holds true for the Birthers - some of them are just plain dumb. But most of them are smart enough to know better - and the same holds true in this country.

Part of it is clearly an internet effect. Isolated people who, previously, would have kept to themselves or been part of a small group can find eachother and cluster. That’s clearly a major part of the “Birther” thing and it’s equally-nutty partner the 9-11 Conspiracy theory. And that’s part of what’s going on here too - the most partisan Liberals and New Democrats can all cluster. However, another part that is very visibly in play here is what I would describe as the emotional amplification cycle. People who are already on edge gather together and then key eachother up. Thus Liberals and their allies, already in a state of perpetual outrage because they believe that they have been deprived of their God-given right to rule the rest of us, manage to turn what would otherwise be a bit of Parliamentary trivia into THE BIGGEST AND MOST IMPORTANT THING THAT EVER HAPPENED IN THE WORLD EVER(TM). It’s a self-reinforcing process. Person A is agitated and talks to Person B who makes them more agitated and so forth.

The other similarity here is that a lot of this is driven by re-directed anger. Let’s face it - a lot of the more fanatical “Birther” people really are just angry that one of “those people” is the President and are in search of a somewhat more socially acceptable way of expressing it. Similarly, many on the Canadian left harbour an inchoate and inexpressible rage against the Prime Minister because he is, in their minds, a usurper, since only Liberals are entitled to rule the country. Since most of these people have enough sense to know that publicly declaring that, “the idea of a Prime Minister who isn’t a Liberal is fundamentally un-Canadian” they have instead made a habit of proclaiming that everything he does is somehow a violation of some basic democratic principle, a reflex rooted in their unspoken belief that his mere incumbency in office is some vast disturbance in the force.

Canadians For Proroguing Parliament

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Yoshida) — Tue, 5 Jan 2010 01:10:00 -0800

Frankly, it’s kind of hilarious that the creator of the “Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament” Facebook group invokes the example of the “Long Parliament” during the English Civil War in making his case. I, for one, would heartily approve of emulating that example - at least the part of it where Cromwell had them dispersed at sword-point. One surmises that whoever decided to make the invocation didn’t read to the end of the Wikipedia article. A better example might be the French Revolution’s “Tennis Court Oath” but (Spoiler Alert!) that didn’t turn out so well for everyone either.

I, for one, am all for proroguing the House for... well... A very long time indeed. This country is lacking for a lot of things but self-important grandstanding is not one of them. And, really, that’s what we’re talking about here, isn’t it? There’s no serious suggestion that the opposition wants to have an election right now, is there? If they do, then by all means let them say so and let us have one.

The drama-queenery of the whole exercise is characteristic of the whole haughty attitude of manufactured outrage that has been the stock-in-trade of the Liberals since they lost power four years ago. This might not well be what you voted for, or whatever else you want to write on the CBC’s message boards but, as it happens, it’s pretty much exactly what I repeatedly voted for - and repeatedly volunteered and donated money for going all the way back to High School - so the rest of you can sit on the outside looking in for at least a few more years.

A few further thoughts, for anyone who cares:

First of all, the idea that the Conservatives, as a minority government, are somehow obligated to govern with reference to the desires of the rest of Parliament is inconsistent with the history of this country. After all, it was the successive minority Liberal governments of Lester Pearson that fundamentally transformed this country - Medicare, the new flag, the dissolution of the old independent armed services were all done by those governments. The opposition’s option, if it doesn’t like what the government does, is to vote it down and force a new election - something that the opposition has repeatedly declined to do.

Second, with regard to the whole opposition freak-out regarding Afghan detainees, I think it’s safe to say that no one really cares what happened or happens to those people. Given that their compatriots in the Taliban are murdering Canadians on a fairly regular basis in search of the right to stone women and shoot gay people, I think that it’s fair to say that public empathy for them is limited. A large number of Canadians are skeptical about the whole Afghan mission and I’m pretty sure that 99%+ of Canadians would be opposed to a mission whose primary purpose turned out to be, as some would seemingly have it, protecting people who want to kill Canadian soldiers and civilians from justice at the hands of their own government.

Third, it’s rich to hear all of this talk about “democracy” from people who tried to launch something that looked an awful lot like a coup d’teat within two months of the election last year (in defense of their divine right to loot the Canadian treasury to replenish their party funds). For that matter, I’m not sure why a party that was driven from power mostly because they were caught stealing from the public till to fund their activities thinks that it has the right to prattle on so about integrity and the like.

Psychologically, this hissy-fit is motivated by the left’s continuing disbelief that anyone other than themselves should govern this country. After decades during which the Liberals did their best to sap the nation’s spirit and to turn us into a third-rate European welfare state it appears as though we finally have a leader who might bring actual change to this place. Who isn’t a slave to every fashionable international cause. Who might actually roll back the frontiers of a state that has stolen the dreams and fortunes of generations in a failed and futile quest after some delusional dream of “equality.”

Prime Minister Harper has clearly been playing a long game. After four years he’s going to have a Conservative plurality in the Senate. And, actually, it’ll be an effective majority at that point - if the Liberals try to use the Senate to stall after the end of this month he can invoke his right under the Constitution to request that the Monarch appoint up to eight additional Senators. The immature antics of the opposition offer the possibility - that I thought would never come - that he might well turn this country into something great again.

The Angry Men

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Yoshida) — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 21:59:00 -0800

Over at The Guardian, George Monbiot claims that the “premise (of the Copenhagen summit) is that the age of heroism is over.” He mourns those who will not be, “constrained by taxes, gun laws, regulations, health and safety, especially by environmental restraints.” He denounces, “the angry men who seek to derail this agreement, and all such limits on their self-fulfilment” and proclaims this to be the, “age of accommodation.”

As one of the “angry men” who Mr. Monbiot answers, I feel called to offer a response: the hell with that. And you, George, can go straight to Hell.

In a single column, the man has managed to epitomize the things that I despise the most the movement with which the man is aligned. The doctrine of limits - a program of planned national and civilizational suicide - is the most dangerous promulgated in our age. It says that, having come this far, humanity should go no further. It embraces and seeks to impose upon the rest of us the essentially religious sentiment that humanity is at the service of nature rather than the other way around.

Men such as this would drain all of the glory and splendor from the world. Small men, petty men, they would seek because they do not have the stuff of greatness in them to deny that the possibility of such a thing exists or, insofar as they cannot deny it, to stigmatize, denounce, and destroy it.

Such men cannot comprehend the wonder of Churchill in that magnificent May of 1940 as Britain stood alone. They cannot imagine the beauty of the parade of the victorious Army of the Potomac. They do not look upon Apollo 11 breaking the bonds of Earth with wonder and poetry and imagination.

What they would have for us is a smaller, grayer world. They would place the petty concerns of peons ahead of the greatest achievements and joys of man.

Can you imagine if such men were to truly get their way? A soft-focus world of weak men and ordinary lives? The man proposes to create purgatory on Earth.

The soft, quiet, totalitarian-by-necessity world that Mr. Monbiot envisions (and, after all, how does one force the rest of us to live with such restraints as he wishes, except by means of some sort of Gestapo apparatus?) is, as he says, no world for heroes. And such a world - with no heroes, no glory, no wonder, no splendor - isn’t a world I care to live in. I, and the other angry men he fears, will never, so long as any of us live, consent to live in such a place. We will fight forever and ever and, if Mr. Monbiot is sincere and truly does seek to use the most extreme measures to stop and oppress us, I wish to assure him that there shall be no length, no means of resistance of which we shall not avail ourselves.

People like this man proclaim that, having come so far as this, we ought to stop and slow ourselves to the pace of the slowest and the lamest. Their fantasies of a brighter-sharing-caring world make me sick, not because they’re evil, but because they’re so very dangerous. You stop and die in the mud if you like, George, but the rest of the world will not do the same. Your doctrine runs contrary to human nature and is thus false. All you can do is to destroy all that a thousand generations that came before us built.

Therein lies the danger. Because, even if Mr. Monbiot speaks for the elites of the West (and I fear he might), he doesn’t speak for the world. Any nation, any civilization, that embraces his doctrine won’t be saved - it will be crushed underfoot by some stronger and more vibrant one. He would condemn us to slavery.

And that is why I and the angry men are so very, very angry. Not because we’re reactionaries who can’t accept that we have reached our limits - but because we’re the forward-thinkers who can see what happens to us and our entire heritage of liberty if our people follow false prophets.

Here, it would seem - to borrow from Mr. Reagan - is a man who would have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the Pharaohs. Who would have had Christ refuse the cross. And therein lies the danger because, should he convince enough - and he and his ilk have convinced man - of this, then our children will live in slavery and we shall never be saved.

In his rant against “expanders”, he ignores or forgets one key point: this isn’t the only planet that we have. This is not the last frontier. We have the technology to go to other worlds. We have the technology - or are within reach of it at any rate - to transform other words to suit our own ends. And it will happen, whether Mr. Monbiot wants it to or not. We can go to Mars. We can transform that planet. We can transform this planet. We have the technology. If we don’t, then someone else will.

Think on it for a moment. Even assuming that he was right, do you think that the rest of the world would follow? If we accept this all we do is ensure that the future belongs to someone else and make it so that all that our fathers did was create the technology that let other people transform the world, the Solar System and, God willing, one day the universe itself.

And that, my friends, is why we - the angry men and I - ought to haunt George’s nightmares. Because, by his very words, he has exposed himself as weak, as accommodating. He warns that, “there is no end to this fight, no line these people will not cross.”

And, on that point, he’s right.

Is the Climate Change Industry the New Enron?

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Yoshida) — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 23:32:00 -0800

At heart, the scheme is worthy of a Bond villain.

Imagine “Springtime for Hitler” on a global scale. In Mel Brooks’ The Producers, an unscrupulous Broadway producer and an accountant plot to make the worst musical of all time - a tribute to Adolf Hitler - and plan to make a killing in the process by selling the rights many times over on the theory that no one will ever ask what happened to the money they invested in a giant flop. In light of the revelation that “scientists” at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia deliberately altered climate data in order to invent a warming trend in the face of temperatures that have actually declined over the past eleven years it’s hard not to wonder if that’s what’s been going on here.

What most people don’t realize is that Climate Change is big business. Billions - potentially trillions - of dollars.

On a global basis, the sincere concerns of millions of people have been cynically exploited by people who have misdirected their honest passion into a money-making scheme.

It’s ultimate refuge in audacity. Corporate criminals pose as defenders of the Earth and assemble vast fortunes peddling technologies and schemes that most people don’t expect to actually work to combat an unfalsifiable crisis. Together with other interested parties, they buy the data they need to secure their profits. Then they smear anyone who disagrees with them as being the pay of Evil Corporations.

This would not be a coordinated conspiracy. There are no Secret Protocols of the Elders of Gaia. I maintain my belief that any conspiracy that would involve more people than can comfortably be seated inside of a portable toilet (which, to be entirely clear, is, in my opinion, one) cannot possibly be kept secret for any extended periods of time.

This would be a conspiracy of common interest.

The scientists - like those at the University of East Anglia - need a crisis to convince people to keep them in operation.

The politicians and activists who preach the word need an excuse for extending the reach of government. After all, as others have pointed out in the past, it’s probably not a coincidence that the current wave of the environmental movement took off contemporaneously with the fall of the Soviet Union. Just take a stroll through Wikipedia someday and look up the members of the New Left who’ve lived to late middle age and how many of them ended up somewhere in the new movement.

Finally, into the breach, step business charlatans. They create “green” ventures of all sorts and convince governments to hand them fat contracts and subsidies. And they never have to deliver. The scientists don’t care is the businesses get paid so long as they get paid too. The politicians and activists don’t care what happens to the money either - not really - they care about looking like they care, about making themselves feel better about themselves, and about extending the reach of government into all facets of human life. And these illegitimate businessmen love it because no one expects them to actually produce anything of value.

So, who loses in this?

The most obvious losers are the millions of honest citizens and enterprises who are being taxed to pay for non-viable ventures justified by science that increasingly appears not merely to be incorrect but actively fraudulent.

When I was young, we mostly talked about “Global Warming.” When my parents were my age, the threat was “Global Cooling.” That’s why “Climate Change” is now the preferred nomenclature - it’s a catch-all that can paint everything as an urgent threat.

The biggest loser in all of this is the environment itself. A fraction of the money and energy spent fighting the “Climate Change” phantom could have brought clean air and water to tens of millions of people. Lunatics debates over “carbon credits” in Europe and North America have given the Chinese political cover to undertake a rapid industrial expansion that is poisoning a fair chunk of the Earth. The energy and hope of millions of people that might otherwise have been usefully channeled into a thousand local projects of use has instead been expended in making those people the unwitting dupes and propagandists of duplicitous corporate interests.

When people at Enron falsified figures and misled the world to get people to invest, some of them ended up going to jail. Shouldn’t everyone be held to the same standard?

Thinking the Unthinkable on Iran

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Yoshida) — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 23:50:00 -0700

A tragically misunderstood Briton once proclaimed that, “the supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils.” No better illustration of the truth of that maxim may be found than in our present struggle with the Iranian regime. The unhappy juncture that we have reached may be attributed to the failures of many who, in holding power, chose politics over statesmanship. Now, as Iran moves towards nuclear weapons we are left with nothing but bad choices. Blood will be shed - what remains to be decided now is merely whose and in what quantity.

Some people believe that there are alternatives to violence in this situation. Those people are tragically mistaken and are, in fact, the co-authors of the present calamity. Five years ago, the work of a single-afternoon might have ended Iran’s nuclear program. A single well-planned air assault. Or perhaps even simply a program of targeted assassinations against key personnel. For year after year they have counseled caution and delay until such a point where, with the Iranian nuclear program widely-dispersed and well-defended, our choices are reduced to fight or surrender. And, I hasten to add, the latter option might not even be available to some - the present Iranian Defense Minister is wanted by INTERPOL for blowing up a Jewish community centre in Argentina and the Iranian President has repeatedly, openly, and infamously proclaimed his desire to engage in genocidal campaign against the State of Israel while also spouting off about his belief in the need to bring about chaos on the Earth in order the the Hidden Imam may be made to show himself.

These are not rational people. They are not even the latter-day reincarnation of the banally-evil Nazi bureaucrats who managed the machinery of death - such creatures might well, under the right circumstances, have been reasoned with or bought off. They’re the better-armed cousins of the crazed Rwandan Hutus who hacked a million of their Tutsi neighbours to death with machetes fifteen years ago. Even if one believes that Israel is somehow responsible for all evil in the world, I believe that it is fair to say that a mass-murderer of Argentine Jews and the man who put him in charge of his military are motivated by something deeper than legitimate geopolitical grievances.

“The Iranians”, it is believed, “can be deterred just as the Soviet Union was.” Perhaps so. But I, for one, am not willing to bet my life - and for that matter the lives of millions of other people - on the belief that the Iran’s leader is just kidding when he goes around claiming to be preparing for the pseudo-millennial and apocalyptic unveiling of the Mahdi. A century and a bit ago the followers of some other nut who proclaimed himself to be to Mahdi cheerfully charged into British machine guns, certain that paradise awaited them on the other side, does it really seem so improbable that their descendants might believe that it lies on the other side of a mushroom cloud?

North Korea, it is pointed out, has been allowed to acquire nuclear weapons and the world has not ended (yet). I’ll grant the essential truth of this point - a nuclear North Korea has been appeased by a West willing to meet its demands. By surrendering twenty million people to a life of slavery under a family of obvious lunatics we have bought ourselves a little temporary safety. Of course, anyone viewing the situation with clear eyes can see that this is a “solution” only in the sense that cordoning off a school and leaving it to be administered by some guy who ran into it with an Assault Rifle and 10,000 rounds of ammunition is one also. Eventually he’s probably going to find some other target for his gun. Even if we ignore the basic immorality of leaving twenty million people as the literal slaves of a perverted madman, it’s pretty clear that the North Korean solution can only be replicated at the price of surrendering nation after nation to whatever strongman can acquire the bomb.

We have already seen that the Iranian people do not support the regime that rules them. We have already betrayed their noble efforts to assert their freedoms. If we fail to act against the regime now, we will lengthen - and perhaps make eternal - their oppression. If we make it our policy to cower before every dictator with a nuclear weapon and to refuse to take any effectual action to stop them from getting them then soon every dictator will have one and the world’s map will be converted into a picture of one hundred boots stomping on one hundred faces - forever.

The folly of appeasing maniacs is clear to any serious student of history. For that matter, the stupidity of negotiating with sociopaths ought to be known by any person with a passing familiarity with other human beings.

There’s a moment in Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels that seems apropos at the moment. On the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, the Army of the Potomac retreated in the face of the Southern army - but immediately began to fortify strong positions that, were they to hold, would give them the final victory. General Isaac Trimble noticed a vacant hill that, in Confederate hands, would have offered the ideal spot from which to threaten the flank of the Union forces. Later, he relates to General Lee what happened when he asked his commander for permission to act:

“Sir, I said to him, ‘General Ewell,’ these words, I said to him, ‘Sir, give me one division, and I will take that hill.’ And he said nothing. He just stood there and he stared at me. I said, ‘General Ewell, give me one brigade, and I will take that hill.’ I was becoming disturbed, sir. And General Ewell put his arms behind him and blinked. So I said, ‘General, give me one regiment, and I will take that hill.'

“And he said nothing. He just stood there. I threw down my sword, down on the ground in front of him.

“We, we could have done it, sir. A blind man should have seen it. Now they’re working up there. You can hear the axes of the Federal troops. So in the morning many a good boy will die, taking that hill.”

We are left with nothing but bad options. At worst, a nuclear Iran means millions of people dead - perhaps tens of millions - and at best it means the long-term slavery of the Iranian people under a regime many (if not most) of them openly despise. We failed to act and now, because of that, some - and perhaps many - will die. We don’t know if it will be Israelis, murdered by the regime. Some may be Iranians, killed by their increasingly-brazen leaders. Some may be the collateral victims of military action - people who wouldn’t have died if the strikes had come sooner, before the Iranians began to build more of their military facilities in areas with large civilian populations.

Either Israel strikes, the United States strikes (which seems to be unlikely, given the cowardice of the present Administration in Washington) or Iran goes nuclear. Whatever happens, people die who did not have to. The situation is fluid and dangerous.

Israel, we are told, does not have the capability to do more than set back the Iranian nuclear program by a few years - at best. This is obviously untrue and most of the people speaking it ought to or do know better. While it is true that the Israelis lack the ability to launch the sort of massive and coordinated air strike that the United States could launch to end the Iranian nuclear threat, it is also true that Israel does have the technical means - and perhaps the will - to end it by extraordinary measures. It is unlikely and unthinkable, of course, and would create an uproar unlike any other that we have seen in our lives but, faced with the choice between that and a Second Holocaust, Israel’s Prime Minister - a statesman whose writings and words reflect a deep understanding of the will that is required in combating preventable evils - would be irresponsible not to be thinking about the unthinkable.

A Controlled Fury - Thoughts on the Harmonized Sales Tax

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Yoshida) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 01:21:00 -0700

In and of itself, the HST isn’t a bad idea. As anyone who has dealt first-hand with the nightmarish world of sales tax collection can tell you, the present system is a Kafkaesque mess of confusion. Tax simplification is a positive good in and of itself. Also, I believe - on both economic and moral grounds - that taxes on consumption, such as sales taxes, as superior to taxes on the production of wealth, such as income and capital gains taxes. The latter class of tax discourages productivity, encourages dishonest economic gamesmanship, and demands an excessive government involvement in the life of the people.

That said, clearly the HST is the wrong tax being levied on the wrong people at the wrong time and the Province, if it has any political common sense, will beat a hasty retreat on the matter. Leaving aside the general foolishness of raising taxes of any sort in the midst of a recession, they’ve also handed a populist rocket launcher to the NDP.

One has to marvel at the lack of judgement it has taken to put the NDP on the right side of a tax issue. For all of the lingering memories of the Fast Ferries and other fiascos, what I - and countless other British Columbians - shall never forget or forgive are the ruinous taxes that the New Democrats imposed upon the people in order to fund their reckless giveaways to their friends in the labour movement. Even had I not already vowed before almighty God and Winston Churchill eternal resistance against the scourge of socialism, I for one would never vote for the party who caused my parents’ tax burden to drift into the 60%+ range as I drifted into my teenage years. Don’t ever expect forgiveness from someone you deprived of a car for their sixteenth birthday. I jest - but only just. And perhaps not at all.

I do have a point (or three) to make out of this.

The first is that, on the tax issue, you can trust the New Democrats as far as you can throw a dump truck. Yes, it’s nice to see anyone and everyone standing up against increased taxation, but it’s also perfectly fair to suggest that installing the NDP in Victoria because taxes are too high is a solution with the logical consistency of treating malnutrition with laxatives.

Second - the notion that a mass recall campaign is any sort of solution to this problem is nonsense. No matter how hot the populist fire may burn today, it’ll be long extinguished by the fall of 2010. The barrier to the recall of any MLA is nearly impossibly high - 40% of all registered voters during the last election (not merely those who cast ballots). And, to tie in with what I stated above, the only alternative government is the New Democrats and, well, we’ve already been over that.

There is another alternative: the other half of the law that permits the recall of MLA’s. That law - the Recall and Initiative Act - permits the introduction of citizen-driven legislation. It’s never been effectively used. But it could be. In this sort of environment - stripped of the partisan connotations of a recall effort - it just might work. Or, at a minimum, might force the government into a course correction.

Finally - amidst this rancor - it’s probably worth reminding people that, overall, a decade under the BC Liberals has been good for the Province. I lived here during the 1990’s, when the toxic combination of NDP-Union kleptocracy and mismanagement sunk us to the status of a have-not Province, when our infrastructure decayed, and when we were the laughing stalk of the nation. Under the Liberals we’ve built roads and bridges. Our taxes are lower - if not as low as they could be. We’ve avoided most - if not all - of the trendy social experiments that defined the NDP years. If the Liberals are arrogant - and there’s really no “if” about that one - it’s because they have a lot to be arrogant about.

So, absolutely, the Liberals clearly need a reminder as to the nature and the scope of their mandate but, please God, let us remember where we are and why we got here. The Liberals are, in many ways, the natural successors to WAC and Bill Bennett, who may have been dull during their three and a half decades in power but who, by God, made the power flow and the Ferries run on time.

Tax Coke? No. Tax Jogging Instead

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Yoshida) — Thu, 14 May 2009 23:24:00 -0700

Running low on ways to bleed older targets of convenience (smokers, drinkers, etc), the U.S. Senate - whose example will doubtlessly be emulated in countless other places during these taxing times - is contemplating a tax on pop and other sugared beverages in order to fund the Obama Administration’s dream of (further) socializing American medicine. This, along with other sin taxes on foods and beverages that are unpopular with people of a certain cast of mind, is being justified upon the spurious grounds that the consumption of these items imposes costs upon all taxpayers through the public financing of health care.

This is wrong in every way.

First of all, I put it to you - and this is well-trodden ground, I know - that the argument that socialized medicine forces us to bear the costs of the irresponsible behavior of some and therefore we should regulate that behavior actually makes the case against socialist health care. Without a free market to regulate and constrain the behavior of individuals we are left with two bad choices. Either we can simply pay for those who choose to be free riders or we can attempt to control their behavior through coercion.

Obviously none of us would opt for the former. However, the latter is injurious to liberty requiring, as it does, odious and progressive regulation of individual choice of the sort that no free people should ever accept. The ability to make “bad” decisions is integral to freedom.

And, of course, the argument of the regulators and socializers assumes that there is some body competent to make objective decisions as to which activities cost the system money and therefore ought to be penalized and which “preventative” ones help to reduce costs and therefore should be subsidized. Assuming there is such a group of people anywhere in the world, I can assure you that they are not in the service of the state.

Thus, in these cases, value judgements are substituted for economic ones. Thus are the things that the regulators and their friends believe to be bad - smoking, drinking, fast food, Coca-Cola - condemned and taxed. There’s a simply rational thought process behind this: these things are “unhealthy” and therefore they are “bad” and therefore they must cost the government money and should thus be taxed. The propaganda to this effect is so pervasive that those who indulge in these vices, for the most part, happily consent to their mugging.

This, as is so often the case where popular and widespread beliefs are concerned, is totally wrong. One simply needs to think it through with cold rationality. Who is likely to cost the state more money: the obese man who drops dead of a sudden and massive heart attack at the age of sixty-four or the jogger who requires knee and hip surgery and who lives to the age of ninety-four, requiring sustained individual care for the last decade of their life? “Duh” is an appropriate answer here.

A recent Dutch study found that, “For healthy 20 year olds, the remaining lifetime health care costs over $400,000, compared with $365,000 for the obese and $321,000 for the smokers.” Those numbers, I think, actually understate the case. The guy who dies at the age of sixty-four never collects a government pension (though I suppose his widow might, depending on the circumstances, collect something - but the cost would nonetheless be massively reduced). He ends up passing his savings on to his children, perhaps freeing them from dependence upon state subsidies in their own age, instead of burning up an accumulated lifetime of wealth in a futile and miserable effort to cheat death.

We’re facing an imminent crisis of public finance. Frankly, my generation can’t afford for most of the Baby Boomers to live into their ninth and tenth decades. We shouldn’t be taxing soda - we should be subsidizing it. The government should be erecting posters encouraging the Baby Boomers to smoke, drink, eat, and generally be merry for the sake of their children. Hell, if we’re going to tax anything, let’s tax jogging - joggers being people whose irresponsible and reckless behavior wears out their bodies, requiring expensive operations to correct, for the selfish purpose of living longer lives during which they will be ever-increasing draws on the treasury. Yeah - let’s tax them.

The Known and the Unknown

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Yoshida) — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 15:16:00 -0700

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once declared that everything in life can be broken down into three categories - the things that you know you know, the things that you know that you don’t know, and those that you don’t know that you don’t know. In other words - the known knowns, the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns. Thus, in the case of the Swine Flu, we - as citizens - are left with facts that fall into all three boxes.

Here is what we know:

We know that there is a new strain of Influenza that has emerged in the last few months.
We know that the strain falls into the H1N1 sub-type, one that has been responsible for multiple pandemics in the past, including the Spanish Flu of 1918-19.
We know that the epicenter of the outbreak is in Mexico, mostly in Mexico City.
We know that the virus has now spread globally, with cases in about ten countries, most of them with a direct link to the Mexican outbreak.
We know that there is no vaccine available.
We know that some anti-viral drugs, such as Tamiflu, appear to be viable treatment options.

Here are some of the things that we know that we don’t know:

We don’t know the degree to which the Mexican Government, hardly known for efficiency and incorruptibility in the best of times, is capable of coping with and making an honest accounting of the scale of the crisis. This is a serious factor, because we are going to have to rely upon them in ascertaining the magnitude of the problem that we face. If their numbers are correct and there have only been twenty additional deaths and a few hundred additional cases since the first reporting, then it’s possible that the problem may already be coming under control. If those numbers are, by deception or incompetence, inaccurate - then we may suffer an unpleasant surprise in the coming days.

We don’t know the degree to which our leaders - at all levels - are acting upon information that has yet to be disclosed to the public. This is one element that bears close observation. I can’t recall of another example where I’ve seen such a flurry of governmental activity. Governments, by nature, are lethargic creatures - this has governments jumping into action globally. We’ve seen an awful lot of activity over this weekend. Are all of these Governors, Cabinet Secretaries, and so forth simply acting out of a post-Katrina CYA mode (“let’s make sure that we’re seen to do something in case this really gets bad!”) or do they have access to information that has frightened them enough to spur action.

We don’t know how quickly it’s spreading. The first reports are of fairly isolated cases. However, if the sickness is easily passed on, those reports could quickly multiply. In particular, overcrowded hospitals with long waits could easily become a driver of infection. As could schools and the like.

We don’t know what actual stockpiles of anti-viral drugs look like and who has control over them.

Finally, of course, there are the things that we don’t know that we don’t know. When you’re walking down the street you know that there’s a danger from the car speeding towards you. You know that you don’t know if there’s a car about to fly around the corner. You don’t know that you don’t know that there’s a decommissioned Soviet reconnaissance satellite about to fall on you.

“Less Dangerous” American Swine Flu?

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Yoshida) — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 14:54:00 -0700

Over at TPM Josh Marshall, who really should know better, makes a throwaway comment about the “mystery” of the American strain of the Swine Flu being, “much less virulent” than the one circulating in Mexico. This is something that, across multiple blogs, I’ve seen claimed over the last two days. It really needs to be addressed.

To do that, we need to discuss a basic question: why is this particular form of Influenza so threatening? Because it falls outside of predictable patterns for this disease. Where normally the flu needs to take out the very young, the very old, and the very sick, the strain that spread during this pandemic of 1918-19 killed by triggering a type of fatal immune reaction in otherwise healthy young and middle-aged people called a “Cytokine storm.” We seem to be seeing a similar pattern among the deaths in Mexico.

It’s really, therefore, far too soon to proclaim that the “American” version of the disease is somehow different or less fatal. Not only have there only been a handful of cases, but the demographic breakdown of those cases that we know some details of (IE - the Queens high school students) suggests that most of the known infected fall outside of the most vulnerable demographic subgroup.

The Mexican Flu: Time to Panic?

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Yoshida) — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 14:28:00 -0700

Should we panic about the new H1N1 virus that is ravaging Mexico City and seems, within the last few hours, to have quickly spread to New York City, Kansas, and possibly Montreal? Yes, probably, though I hasten to note that blind panic never does any good for anyone. So, in my very best official voice I will state that while we should not panic, we ought to view the developing situation with deep and growing concern.

I’ve heard some people, particularly commenters on various news sites, express thoughts like, “well, it’s just the flu - thousands of people die from the flu every time it breaks out.” That’s fair enough, but it misses several important points about this particular outbreak.

This is a new flu strain - it’s of the H1N1 type, but it’s a new mutation. There isn’t a vaccine for it. This is a Avian-Swine-Human hybrid virus.
Reports out of Mexico suggest that most of the dead are not in the classes typically vulnerable to the flu - the very young, the elderly, and the immuno-compromised. Instead, the reports have the contagion mostly claiming healthy young adults, much like the Spanish Flu of 1918-19.
Based on earlier reports, the case fatality ratio here seems to be very, very high - something like 6-7%. In comparison, the Spanish Flu had a CFR in the 2-3% range.

This is a problem we should take seriously. We don’t yet have enough information to answer the question of how seriously. The information that we have is sketchy at best but, overall, it paints a picture of a situation that is worse than the official statements have let on.

First of all, I think that it’s probably fair to say that the much-bandied numbers regarding the outbreak - about a thousand sick in Mexico and sixty-eight dead - are completely obsolete. The fact that we haven’t had any new numbers since yesterday is perhaps the most troubling fact before us at the moment. The Mexicans, the WHO, and the CDC all know that they’ve set off world-wide fears about a pandemic. If they had positive numbers to give us (“there have only been fifteen new cases reported in the last twenty-four hours and only two additional deaths”) I think that they would be pushing them out via every means of communication. By inference, that leads me to believe that the outbreak in Mexico City and its surrounding areas has not abated.

The actions of the Mexican Government, the CDC, and the WHO in the last twenty-four hours also suggest a deepening crisis. Remember - they have more information than we do. In the last few hours, we’ve gotten two bits of concerning news:

The Mexican Government has empowered its health officials to begin conducting house-by-house inspections and to quarantine the infected. That suggests, to me at least, a deepening problem. The scale of the voluntary lockdown imposed on Mexico City also suggests something big.
The WHO’s inconclusive meeting on whether to raise the pandemic alert level. Frankly, I can’t think of many things that make me more nervous than when Doctors can’t quite decide or agree on what to do.

What is the individual citizen to do about this? That’s a tougher decision. From where I’m standing, there isn’t much that the individual can do - other than perhaps to stock up on some supplies and to keep their head up. From there, we have some harder questions.

I can tell you one thing - I’d much rather be in the United States than anywhere else at the moment. For all of its flaws, the American health care system is the best-positioned to deal with this sort of pandemic. Most reports suggest that Tamiflu and other antiviral drugs are the best weapon against H1N1. Not only is the United States going to have the largest stockpiles of the stuff (and first dibs on additional production), but it also has a solid Doctor:patient ratio and an effective distribution of Doctors. Dispersion is going to be key in a crisis because major medical centers are likely to be overwhelmed and, more than that, are going to be as likely to spread as to combat the virus. As well, if things really get bad, the United States has a large enough military to render effective aid to the civil power - I don’t think that’s the case elsewhere. I know damned well that it isn’t the case in Canada.

I’m not sure how much use some of the other measures being discussed - travel bans and the like - will be of at this point. But, on the other hand, I can’t really see how they would hurt.

We Can Be Safe Still

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Yoshida) — Wed, 3 Dec 2008 00:17:00 -0800

The present struggle is not only for today; it is for the yesterday and tomorrow as well. The question with which we are confronted is, fundamentally, whether this country has a future or not. The victory of the Separatist-Socialist coalition in the coming days would end any chance of this country surviving to celebrate it’s bi-centennial. Indeed, if the separatists and socialists win I doubt if we’ll even make it to one hundred and fifty. The question is whether we can now honour our past and preserve our future.

Is that over-dramatic? I don’t believe that it is. Where, one wonders, will the untold treasures now being promised to Ontario and Quebec come from if they are not looted from the West? Unless Mme. Dion intends to have Midas in the Cabinet, there will be no choice for the Coalition but to strike at the West.

Where would that $30 Billion (and when have you ever known a government program to come in on or under budget?) come from, if not from the West? Quebec can’t very well transfer money to itself, can it? Ontario isn’t going to fund its own manufacturing bailout. And, as I mentioned before, we all know that the final cost of the thing isn’t going to be the number that we’re given up front.

The Separatist-Socialist coalition would, so far as most of the Western Provinces are concerned, be nothing less than an occupying power. If the coalition were to come to power, the West would be transformed into a de facto colony – exploited for resources and receiving nothing in return. If we pay any heed to the argument (and I don’t believe that we should) that the Coalition should be allowed to govern because it won, when added together, a majority of the national popular vote, then I believe that we should also consider that the Conservatives singularly won a majority of the vote in the West. The coalition’s control in the West extends little farther than a handful of Green Zones in urban centers.

“No taxation without representation” has been an effective slogan in the past. I have little doubt that it could be again – especially when the wealth of a region is being effectively looted to satiate the endless and obscene appetites of certain regions for Western cash to subsidize their own indolence. At least when the British levied taxes upon the American colonists they were meant to defray the costs of their own defense.

Indeed, in speaking to many friends over the last few days, I find myself in the uncomfortable position of acting as the moderate. I, for one, don’t hate the East. Half of my family comes from Thunder Bay, Ontario. There are people in my own life who are from the East who are very dear to me. I don’t want to be their enemy. We must not be enemies.

Yet, if this proposal were to come to pass, what other choices would we of the West have? If the Coalition is allowed to take office and enact its program, we would find ourselves subject to the tyrannical whims of what would be, effectively, a foreign government. As things stand already, it costs us more to be in Confederation than it would to stand outside of it.

The tyranny would also, more than likely, to be eternal. If those three parties form some kind of permanent alliance, that would mean that Canada would probably never again have a non-Liberal Prime Minister, regardless of how the West votes. I doubt if the Tory-voting majority of Westerners would regard that prospect with equanimity.

I do not wish for any of this to come to pass. By the logic of events drives us inexorably towards this if something does not change. Liberal MP’s aren’t going to abandon the Coalition bandwagon now – Dion has burned his ships. Ezra Levant thinks that falling poll numbers will motivate Liberals to jump ship. I think that we’re likely to see the opposite effect. Falling poll numbers make avoiding an election now a must-do for them, and the only way to do that is to seize power. Like the soldiers in some Soviet punishment battalion, even honourable Liberals must shuffle grimly forward, lest they be shot for attempting to retreat. And, once they are in power, they will have no way to stay in power but to squeeze the West harder and harder.

Some fault the Prime Minister for this crisis. Personally, I fault him only for backing down on the subsidy issue – if we are going to enter a time of government austerity (as surely we must), then it’s perfectly clear to me that welfare for politicians ought to be the very first thing that we cut. If people don’t like that, they can do what I do – and write out a cheque to their candidate or party.

Perhaps I’m an optimist but I believe that we can still win this fight. Doing so, however, will require that we fully accept the gravity of the situation and, in so doing, respond appropriately. If we will the ends – the defeat of the coalition – then we must accept the means.

A prorogation of the House is a poor option – and will probably lead to defeat. It will look like weakness and will give the coalition time to win public acceptance – and to organize. It may also give the Liberals time to settle their leadership questions. It might also give the Liberals, NDP, and the Bloc the time to work out some kind of electoral pact. As well, the thought that the Tories might then win them over with some sort of “stimulus” package of their own in the January budget violates one of the basic rules of politics – don’t bid where you can be outbid. Whatever they promise, the left will promise (and demand!) more.

No, the first step must be the one I outlined at the outset of the crisis – and which even the Globe and Mail has now taken notice of: fire the Governor-General. If we let the Coalition in, we’re probably going to be stuck with them for the long term. The guilty men and women won’t be eager to face their constituents and will need time to raise money and organize. Once they get that invitation to form a government they will begin to fortify their position and be all the much more difficult to get out.

The problem is that we can’t trust Michelle Jean to do the right thing here. After all, she’s a Liberal appointee with separatist ties. We simply can’t trust her. We have to sack her. The Prime Minister should phone the Queen and advice her to immediately dismiss Michelle Jean – advice that she would be Constitutionally obligated to accept. Whoever gets the job next should not be someone known for their independence of thought. He should do this now – as in at this very moment.

The Globe and Mail refers to this as a “nuclear option” – and they’re right. One of the principles of nuclear warfare is referred to as “use ‘em or lose ‘em.” When the enemy’s missiles are in flight you either have to shoot off what you’ve got or not. We have the bomb – we should use it.

Once that happens, the Prime Minister should call an election. Again, I mean today – and for the minimum period. Let’s vote on January 7th. All three opposition parties are effectively broke. The Liberals don’t even have a permanent leader. In doing this, the Liberals have betrayed everything that they claimed to stand for until fourteen minutes ago. Now the party that slew the deficit wants to piss away $30 Billion we don’t have. Now the party that claimed that the fight against the separatists was akin to a war – a war that required the dirty business of the sponsorship scandal – wants to form a government beholden to the separatists.

This can be our chance. The scrappy forces of the opposition are nearing our trenches and, if we lose our nerve, they will overrun them. But, if we can stand up to them here, we can convert advance into retreat, retreat into rout, and rout into massacre.

Now would be the time for the Prime Minister to consider some of the advice that I offered before the last election. He should remember that 40% of the vote equals a majority – and should concentrate on reaching that 40% rather than fishing for votes with the four parties of the left.

The campaign plan is simple. Begin by taking a strong stand on economic issues and a few other major items of importance – notably criminal justice. Dig in there. Rally your side – and cofound the opposition – by turning the patriotism issue into a plus for our side. Then, once that is done, mark out your fields of fire and then begin shelling the hell out of the enemy. Lay out a platform then move over onto the attack. Start shooting until you run out of ammunition. When that’s over with, swarm over the field and bayonet the survivors.

Concentrate upon the left’s alliance with the separatists. Paint them as the force of disunity that they have become. Attack their grotesque economic irresponsibility. Keep up the pressure – and carry on the fight – and not only can we survive, but I believe that we can win an overwhelming majority.

How I Triggered a Constitutional Crisis (And what to do next)

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Yoshida) — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 23:18:00 -0800

Ok. I’ll confess. I think I did it. So far as I can tell, I was the first one – anywhere – to float the idea of, after the election, having the government use the economic crisis as a pretext to repeal the public financing law as a way of crippling the opposition. I began putting the idea around, both in public and private, on the 26th of September. It’s certainly possible that someone else conceived of the idea independently – but it certainly flatters my vanity to think that they did not.

To begin: it’s the right thing to do on several grounds.

I fail to see why, in times of economic emergency, public money should be going to fund political campaigns. The argument that this is a “mean-spirited” cut or whatever, or is somehow a fundamental question of democracy is so much nonsense. Politicians aren’t morally entitled to money from taxpayers. And, if we’re going to be cutting spending (and we surely are) it makes sense that giveaways to political parties should be the very first thing cut.

It’s also the right thing to do because it would hurt the socialists – badly. Badly enough that they won’t be able to fight an election for years. The fact that what’s politically right and what’s morally right here are one and the same is a very happy coincidence indeed.

Alas, now the socialists – knowing how much they depend on looted taxpayer money for their survival – are talking about taking the desperate step of attempting to form a socialist-more socialist-separatist coalition. In effect, what they are planning is a sort of coup d’teat where, together, they will overthrow Canada’s elected government and seize power.

It’s likely that they won’t have the guts to do it. Instead, I suspect, they’ll posture and shout and then, in the end, a half dozen Liberal MP’s will conveniently absent themselves from the House of Commons on voting day. But, maybe not. Perhaps the opposition realizes how desperate their situation will be if they can’t take public money for themselves. Perhaps they’ll really do it.

Some will, of course, see this as a reason for a U-Turn. Many of them already deplore what they see as beastly unfairness and will be eager for a chance to retreat. There are always people who hesitate in delivering the final blow.

So here’s what needs to happen next: Harper needs to stay the course and to be prepared to act decisively when the moment comes.

The sequence of events over the next few days could play out like this:

1) The Opposition parties get their act together and announce that they’ve formed some sort of coalition, with some Prime Minister-designate.
2) The government is defeated in the House of Commons in the vote over the economic update.

3) Harper goes to the Governor-General and requests the dissolution of Parliament in preparation for a General Election.

Here’s where things get murky. The Governor-General has it within her right to refuse such a request and instead invite whoever else to attempt to form a government. This must, absolutely must, not be allowed to happen. Here is where we have to be bold.

We need good intelligence and we need rapid communications. The relationship between the Prime Minister, the Governor-General, and the Monarchy is a complicated one. The Governor-General is Constitutionally obligated to follow the advice of the Prime Minister – but they also have certain reserve powers – including the ability to dismiss the Prime Minister and invite someone else to form a government. At the same time, the Governor-General is the Monarch’s representative in Canada and is appointed on the advice of the Prime Minister.

Over the weekend, we need to take the temperature. I can’t imagine that the opposition would go to all of this trouble in cobbling together a coalition without first sounding out Michelle Jean who, after all, was appointed by them. We need to read how likely she is to accept an opposition offer to form an alternative government. Such a move would be defensible in a Constitutional sense – there are examples of it occurring in both Canada and in other Commonwealth realms. But, obviously, it would be contrary to our interests.

So, here’s the other step that would need to be taken: if the Prime Minister believes that the Governor-General is likely to accept an opposition proposal to form a new government, then the Prime Minister should contact the Queen and advise her to dismiss the Governor-General immediately, a move that the Queen would be Constitutionally obligated to make.

Now, then, the question is: do we want to do this? The answer is simple: of course we do. Simply being prepared to do it means that the opposition is more likely to back down. And, as I pointed out when I originally proposed this idea two months ago, ending the giveaway of taxpayer money is likely to leave the Liberals (and possibly the Bloc as well) bankrupt. And, if they choose to fight an election… Well, let’s just say that I like Prime Minister Harper’s chances in a campaign fought on the question of whether politicians have a right to public money at the expense of widows and orphans.