Quotulatiousness

December 1, 2009

Most ringing endorsement Stephen Harper has ever received

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:33

I never knew Harper had it in him:

This country’s government is now behaving with all the sophistication of a chimpanzee’s tea party. So amazingly destructive has Canada become, and so insistent have my Canadian friends been that I weigh into this fight, that I’ve broken my self-imposed ban on flying and come to Toronto.

So here I am, watching the astonishing spectacle of a beautiful, cultured nation turning itself into a corrupt petro-state. Canada is slipping down the development ladder, retreating from a complex, diverse economy towards dependence on a single primary resource, which happens to be the dirtiest commodity known to man. The price of this transition is the brutalisation of the country, and a government campaign against multilateralism as savage as any waged by George Bush.

Until now I believed that the nation that has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. The real villain is Canada. Unless we can stop it, the harm done by Canada in December 2009 will outweigh a century of good works.

That’s George Monbiot, known to his enemies as “The Great Moonbat”, stumping for wavering Tory voters to rally to Harper’s side. I realize he doesn’t intend it to be read that way, but for Alberta, the tar sand project is their biggest economic project for this century, and any criticism is taken as an attack on their economic future.

QotD: Nomenclature, 2.0

Filed under: Economics, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:28

Paused over lunch to roll through the Deadpool on TechCrunch, reading about expired internet companies. Been a while. Most had to do with “social media,” and most got millions of dollars to produce a novel way where X could connect Y with P using Z, and then: profit! The names of these companies makes me weep:

Zopo, Lefora, Meetro, Ning, Sinopio, CapaZoo, Joox, Foonz.

These are not businesses. These are characters in a pre-school TV show. I have a tough time imagining a hard-nosed venture capitalist saying Well, it’s an interesting idea you have, and on behalf of my group, we’re willing to invest $12 million in Shagafumoo.

James Lileks, Bleat, 2009-12-01

“Global warming is like pornography for Big Government addicts”

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:36

The mainstream media is still doing a great job of ignoring or minimizing the potential impact of the CRU data leak. Doctor Zero contrasts the gullibility (or worse) of the political classes with the wariness of business people:

Few recent events have illustrated the ineptitude, and political agenda, of the mainstream media more dramatically than “Climagate.” The revelation of email correspondence from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, documenting various attempts to suppress data and manipulate scientific “consensus” with thuggish tactics, confirms what critics of the global-warming movement have always maintained: it has a lot more to do with money and politics than science. In fact, the global-warming movement is essentially the opposite of science — the manipulation and destruction of empirical data to support a theory whose accuracy was decided in advance.

[. . .]

An objective media would respond to this blockbuster news story with front-page headlines and “special report” television treatment. By now, the authors of the incriminating Climate Research Unit emails would be infamous around the world. Top operators of the global warming racket, such as Al Gore, would be hiding in their mansions, afraid to face the mob of angry reporters gathered outside. Liberals love to accuse big corporations of manufacturing crises and taking advantage of consumers with false product information and deceptive advertising. Here is the paramount example of those offenses, on a scale that would widen the eyes of the greatest titans of industry. If a private corporation had conducted a scam as vast, and as destructive to the prosperity of nations — and the aspirations of the working poor…

… but no private corporation could do anything like this, could they? The global warming scam is the kind of crime that only Big Government can mastermind.

Private industry makes plenty of mistakes, but the global warming scam is defined by its utter contempt for costs and benefits — the laws of gravity that hold businesses in orbit around the free market. The global warming cult maintains that no chances can be taken — we must ignore all reservations and contrary evidence, and proceed as if the worst possible outcomes are inevitable, unless we take drastic action. We have to take this action immediately — not even the slightest delay is acceptable. Members of the global warming cult provide constantly shifting dates for environmental doomsday, painting dire pictures of coastal cities becoming aquariums after the polar ice caps melt.

US Army bows to the inevitable

Filed under: Middle East, Military — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:23

With more than one in ten of the troops deployed to Afghanistan being female, the US Army had been trying desperately to prevent healthy young soldiers doing what healthy young soldiers are often most interested in. The army has finally acknowledged that their King Canute imitation wasn’t realistic, given human nature:

Last year, the U.S. Army in Afghanistan has removed the prohibition on sex between male and female soldiers. There are 68,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and about ten percent of them are female. So far this year, about fifteen percent of these female troops have had pregnancy tests, and a few percent of the female troops have gone home because they were pregnant.

Since the 1990s, the army has been big on clean living (or whatever you want to call it) in combat zones. No booze, no sex and not cavorting (you know what that means) with the locals. But with most of the troops in combat zones being young and single, things happened. Some couples got caught. Commanders got tired of having to punish (usually with an Article 15, which is just short of a court martial) troops for “unauthorized fornication.” So now it is, if not authorized, not likely to get you punished (aside from the occasional unexpected pregnancy).

Australia’s Liberal Party dumps leader

Filed under: Australia, Environment, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:16

After losing a number of shadow ministers over a proposed carbon tax, Australia’s Liberals have replaced Malcolm Turnbull with AGW skeptic Tony Abbott.

Australian conservatives have shown the way by dumping the party leader who was in favour of massive carbon taxes and replacing him with one who stated last month that AGW is “crap.”

This makes Malcolm Turnbull, the suddenly-ex-leader of Australia’s Liberal party, the first major political victim of the Climategate furore. And his replacement Tony Abbott, the first politician to reap the benefits of the world’s growing scepticism towards ManBearPig. Of the three candidates, he was the only one committed to delaying the Australian government’s proposed Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS).

The trouble began last week when Australia’s opposition Liberal party began haemorrhaging frontbenchers, all of them preferring to lose their jobs than be railroaded by their leader into voting with the Government on Kevin Rudd’s new carbon tax.

Powered by WordPress