I’m pleased to say that this item is now live at GuildMag. This is good news for non-gamers, who won’t have to scroll past all the Guild Wars 2 stuff here once a week. I also hope it’s good news for Guild Wars 2 fans. We’ll see how well the community likes the new column.
December 16, 2011
This week in Guild Wars 2 news
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Reason.TV: Christopher Hitchens – Bah, Humbug on Christmas
Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011.
I’m saddened to write that the great essayist and writer Christopher Hitchens is dead at the age of 62. He had been weakened by the cancer of the esophagus that he disclosed publicly in 2010 and the treatments he had undertaken to fight his illness. Reason extends its condolences to his wife, family, and friends.
As is clear to anyone who has read even a sentence of his staggeringly prolific output, Hitchens was the sort of stylist who could turn even a casual digression into a tutorial on all aspects of history, literature, and art. As a writer, you gaze upon his words and despair because there’s just no way you’re going to touch that. But far more important than the wit and panache and erudition with which he expressed himself was the method through which he engaged the world.
The Toronto Star has a small collection of quotations which do give a sense of the man’s range and wit:
5. About Sarah Palin: “She’s got no charisma of any kind, [but] I can imagine her being mildly useful to a low-rank porn director.”
6. “If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.”
[. . .]
8. About Mother Teresa: “She was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.”
9. “Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay.”
[. . .]
12. About Michael Moore: “Europeans think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they’ve taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all of those qualities.”
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Lorne Gunter on the Kyoto cult: “Ottawa is right to get out of it while it could.”
Much has been made — at least in the British press — about Canada announcing it will withdraw from the Kyoto agreement. Lorne Gunter agrees with the government that it was high time to leave:
It has been written in several places that should Canada fail to bring its emissions down drastically in the coming year, it could be subject to up to $19-billion in fines imposed by Ms. Figueres and the UNFCCC. How? The fines would be in the form of “carbon credits” — we would pay developing countries that aren’t current producing many emissions for their unused carbon. In other words, we could buy the equivalent of medieval indulgences to cover off our carbon sins. No emissions would be reduced, but the UN would be placated by this accounting device.
But what if we refuse to buy credits? In logic that would only ever make sense to UN bureaucrats, the UNFCCC then has the authority to penalize us by making us buy 30% more credits. That’s right, if we refuse to pay $19-billion in environmental baksheesh to cover off our extra emissions, the UN somehow thinks it will be able to convince us to pay $25-billion as a punishment.
Seriously, these people believe this stuff makes sense.
One of the reasons UN bureaucrats have begun using language such as “legal obligation” is that they are hoping to convince national supreme courts to enforce international treaties for them. At the Durban climate summit recently concluded in South Africa, delegates agreed to form an International Climate Court of Justice, partly in hopes that rulings from such a body would be enforced by domestic courts, even against countries, such as Canada, that withdraw from climate treaties.
The UN environmental cult becomes more dangerous to national sovereignty and personal freedom every day. Ottawa is right to get out of it while it could.
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The Philippines seek some cheap aircraft
Strategy Page, on the Philippines’ financial and strategic problems:
The Philippines is asking the U.S. for some used F-16 jet fighters. The Philippines is broke, so the proposed deal is for free F-16s, with the Philippines paying for any upgrades or modifications needed for service in the Philippines Air Force. Normally, the Philippines has no practical need for a jet fighter force. But this has changed because of possible clashes with China, the Filipinos are being practical. China is claiming Filipino territorial waters, including places where the Philippines authorized drilling for oil and gas. The Philippines could never afford to buy, or even just maintain warplanes sufficient to deal with a Chinese air threat. The Philippines depends on its friendship with the United States for protection. American warplanes provide better protection than any jet fighters the Philippines could put in the air. But the Philippines would like a dozen or so F-16s just so they can chase away Chinese warplanes that increasingly fly into Filipino air space.
Six years ago, the Philippines removed from service its eight F-5 fighters. These 1960s era aircraft were not much of a match for more recent warplanes, and were expensive to maintain. In the meantime, the Philippines has been using armed trainer aircraft for strikes against Moslem and communist rebels.
A very Calvin & Hobbes Christmas
H/T to Chris Myrick for the link.
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