Climate Change: The Truth

Once the left gets confident, they tend to let the mask slip. Nowhere is this clearer than in this little piece in the Guardian by Nicholas Stern.
His prescription for the West - pay, pay, and then pay again. Pay by taking an economic hit and bearing the lion's share of reductions. Pay for poor nations to reduce their emissions. Then pay again, to aid the Third World.

That's the real scheme here. That's the fundamental assumption of Kyoto and everything else.

Interestingly, Stern also admits - albiet without thinking through the implications - something which I've touched on in the past.

"Our starting point," he writes, "is deeply inequitable with poor countries certain to be hit earliest and hardest by climate change."

Indeed, that's the fundamental truth here. Even if the predictions of the climate fear-mongers turn out to be the truth, the other truth is that the facts of life in this planet mean that not only will Global Warming barely effect most of us in the upper reaches of the Northern Hemisphere but, in a lot of cases, it would be actually be a positive thing.

I point you to this facinating article from the Atlantic Monthly earlier this year. "Global Warming - Who Loses and Who Wins?" This is a vital point. There are few games where everyone loses. If the Earth gets a few degrees warmer over the next century, who wins?

The likely answer - The West wins. Indeed, a climate shift might well prove to be the West's salvation, for all of its folly. For God's sake, people, I live in British Columbia - an area roughtly the size of the whole West Coast of the United States - which has fewer than five million people living in it because the climate of large regions of the province is fairly immoderate.

Come on people - we're living in Canada here. Is there any Earthly reason why the idea of the world getting slightly warmer ought to concern us? At least three-fourths of the country is frozen right now.

A moderate warming could make all sorts of land open to development and exploitation. It would send crop yields in various areas through the roof.

This is an important point to remember in this climate debate because, in essence, we are being asked to actively harm ourselves to stop something which might not even exist and which, if it actually does come to pass, will probably be to our benefit.

Why is a Hillary Clinton Campaign Member Asking Questions at a Republican Debate?

So, the fellow who just asked the Republican candidates about Don't Ask, Don't Tell, retired Brigader General Keith Kerr, is a member of Hillary Clinton's campaign for the Presidency.

It's probably also worth asking who put a seventy-four year-old guy up to asking a question on YouTube.

(7:42PM) - Welcome NRO readers!

I think that my opinion of this is summed up by Richelieu over at the Weekly Standard:

What a depressing debate. CNN's long slide into mediocrity accelerates. Is this what running for president of the greatest democracy in the world has become? Standing in front of CNN's corporate logo in a hall full of yowling Ron Paul loons and enduring clumsy webcam questions from Unabomber look-a-likes in murky basements?

Which, further, reminds me of the quote I've been hammering home as of late:

"Under a democratical government, the citizens exercise the powers of sovereignty; and those powers will be first abused, and afterwards lost, if they are committed to an unwieldy multitude."
- Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Liveblogging the GOP Debate

Over at the Western Standard.

The French Intifada: A Whiff of Grapeshot

Back in 2005, during the last wave of rioting in France, I predicted that although those disorders would eventually subside that without further action on the part of the government of France they would simply mark the beginning of a clear process of violence followed by concession followed by violence followed by either civil war or surrender. Those who fail to see the Jihadist element in all of this are blind. It might well be that these “Youths”, as the media insist upon calling them, are motivated by economic conditions and by the general liking of many young for mayhem. But it is equally clear that in France today, as we saw in Israel twenty years ago, there has been a clear and progressive escalation of both rhetoric and violence – a movement which, if allowed to proceed unchecked, can only lead to ultimate disaster.

Two years ago (using the pretext, as they are today, of the timely death of a pair of young criminals) the Franco-Islamic street rose in scenes reminiscent of the first stages of the Palestinian intifada nearly two decades before. Rock throwing. Vandalism. The occasional Molotov cocktail. Burned-out cars.

How did the authorities respond to this? As befits cowards, they took their knees and degraded themselves before the criminals. They offered jobs, money, aid – everything. Violence, both its actuality and the threat of greater violence, brought rewards to the budding Jihadists of Paris. Is it any surprise then that, on a similarly flimsy pretext, the violence should erupt anew?

Of course, I am heartless to suggest that the deaths of the two joy-riding criminals which sparked this (in addition to those sparks which set off the last conflagration) are a welcome event. You bleed for those people if you want – but facts are facts and criminals are criminals. Some will blame the French police for failing to aid the young scum when they struck them with their car – but to do so fails to consider the obvious fact that the officers in question were operating within what has become, in effect, a hostile state within the heart of France – and would almost certainly have been attacked and quite possibly killed had they left their car.

Now, though, it seems to be much worse than before. They’re shooting at the police this time. They’re targeting them for death. And how does the French political class respond to this outrage? The Socialists attack their own government, for failing to sufficiently prostrate themselves before the criminal element. What passes for the French “right” cowers and works hard not to offend anyone.

What would General Bonaparte think of what has become of his country?

The course of events is blazingly clear. The last time these riots came, Moslems made up roughly 10% of the French population or six million of sixty. With a low French birthrate, a high Moslem one, and continued immigration – both legal and illegal – who knows what it is now. Perhaps six and a half. Perhaps seven. And what shall it be in ten or twenty years when I, dear reader, am in early middle age and you, however old you are, are probably still here? The crisis is already here – but it is Armageddon that is drawing near.

I mentioned earlier that they are now shooting at the police. At least four police officers have actually been shot. Perhaps more by the time you read this. Over one hundred have been injured. And yet the riots go on. Troops have not been sent in to quell them. The police have not returned fire, even in self-defense.

I am certain that some – perhaps those Canadians so exercised about the recent Taser-related death of a Polish man – will be quick to praise the French police as a model of restraint. But I damn their leaders – those who send men to be injured and deny them the means of self-protection – as cowards. The know that the evil force in their midst must be resisted, but they lack the courage to do so. The enervated state of the French state precludes the use of any strong or effective measure against what, in effect, is a civic revolt.

What do you get when you have?:

1) An Islamic population which is growing, both in real terms and as a percentage of the population, each year.
2) Riots which are growing progressively more violent and beginning to take on the character of a guerrilla war.
3) A civic establishment too exhausted and too cowardly to confront the threat?

Disaster is the answer.

I cannot, at the present time, project the exact course of events. But once we have established the underlying course, we can make some reasonable assumptions.

As the violence increases – and as the French state is progressively paralyzed by this and other factors – those with talent or money will flee abroad. In my own youth, I knew a large number of white South African émigrés. In ten or twenty years, children will be growing up alongside those of many recent Western European immigrants.

Though the French state may be passive and weak in the face of this danger, the same cannot be said for all of the people of France. Some – some motivated by hatred, some by love of their country, some by some mix of each – will not yield France to their opponents. They will fight back with whatever weapons and by whatever means they can.

Neither will all elements of the French establishment yield. There is a reason why this is already the Fifth Republic. Little about French government in the last two centuries has been permanent. Perhaps, given the chance, some General will decide to make the transition from Fifth Republic to Third Empire.

Civil War? Islamic conquest? Military coup? We cannot say now what is in the future of France if events are allowed to proceed unchecked. We can only say that it will be evil that befalls that great nation if it fails to act swiftly.

Rioters do not understand words. They will respond to concessions – appeasement – with only future riots. In any case, the point for negotiations and compromise has long since passed – these rioters are irreconcilable with the West. The only thing that will wake them up is a whiff of grapeshot.

And, after that? Well, we know the answer. The world is not a single big happy place. Everyone cannot live together in peace and harmony. The West’s choice to discard integration in favour of multiculturalism must now be acknowledged for the utter disaster that it is. Those who fail to adopt Western –be they French, English, American, Canadian, Australian – norms ought to be repatriated. Voluntarily if possible – otherwise otherwise.

Australia Election

After a long, tense day of shopping - on which I'll have some thoughts later - I'm liveblogging the election over at the Western Standard.

A Pixelated Lynching

The absurdity of much of the media and the general public’s response to the Robert Dziekanski affair defines reasoned explanation. One Facebook group calling for action to be taken against the RCMP members involved in the death has close to eight thousand members. The incident – more than a month old now –has been on the front page of virtually every paper every single day since the video of the incident was released. On Saturday, the National Post devoted fully ten – count them, ten – pages of coverage to it. Rather, I should say, at least ten. I stopped counting at that point. For all I know, there could have been a whole supplemental section devoted to the matter. The Globe and Mail went so far as to describe the death as an “execution” - a judgement which has been echoed in print and pixels across the land. Has everyone lost their minds?

It is often repeated that this death raises “troubling questions.” And so it does. However, I put it to you that the questions which should be asked are not those which are being asked – or are those which are likely to be asked by any wastefully expensive public inquiry into the matter.

An inquiry seems likely to focus upon the Taser itself and, more broadly, to lambast the RCMP for its glaring failure to greet a violently out-of-control man who they were summoned to subdue with milk and cookies. It appears appalling possible to me that the RCMP members involved might well, either by their superiors or by senior politicians, be thrown under the bus to satisfy public bloodlust on some pathetic technicality.

That’s a serious possibility here. It’s worth recalling, to pick one example, that when Sergeant Ken Deane, responding to a violent Indian protest at Ipperwash in Ontario, shot and killed a man who he believed to be carrying a rifle – a necessary and entirely defensible act – his superiors and the government of Ontario shamefully allowed him to be tried and convicted for criminal negligence causing death. Similarly, we should also remember that in the case of Rodney King – another case where video distorted the public mind – the officers involved were not only disgracefully put on trial for subduing a violent criminal who was high on drugs but then, when a jury correctly acquitted them, were further victimized by a vindictive Federal prosecution whose sole purpose was to satiate the appetites of the unwashed and illiterate masses.

It’s easy to see how these events will play out. The force members involved are marked. The only way to satisfy public anger will be to find something to stick against them. It won’t be murder or manslaughter. Instead, someone will find some minor charge to throw at them or some of them in order to satisfy the public. And that’s a travesty.

So far as the RCMP members are concerned, what happened here?

We know the sequence of events. This man was, for whatever reason, obviously unstable and violently out of control. Airport security declined to deal with him an instead the RCMP were summoned to the scene. When the RCMP arrived, their job wasn’t to attempt to talk sense into a deranged man who they knew not to speak English. Their job was to subdue him. When he resisted their lawful efforts to do so and reached for a weapon – a blunt object which, if used to strike could well have killed or injured one of the force members involved – they used what force they had at hand to subdue him and end the threat he posed. I fail to see what exactly they are supposed to have done wrong here.

The police aren’t social workers. They aren’t there to talk out-of-control people into being nice. When the police are called and a person is violently out of control, it is the job of the police to bring that person under control. Nothing more and nothing less. They did that job and, unfortunately, Mr. Dziekanski died as a result. Yes, it’s sad that a human life was lost – but the blame for that rests upon the person whose violent and dangerous actions forced the RCMP to use force against him. If I go running through the streets with a replica rifle shouting threats at the general public, the RCMP would shoot me – and rightly so. Their job is to, within a split second, respond to threats – not to wait until harm comes to themselves or others and then act.

The RCMP members involved in this incident were doing their jobs. They were defending the public. I don’t believe they deserve to be condemned for that. I will have no part in an ill-informed pixelated lynching of the sort we now see taking place before us.

Yet still, some troubling questions do linger – and ought to be addressed.

Primarily: why was someone with the background and skills of Mr. Dziekanski being allowed into Canada in the first place? How exactly did we come to have an immigration policy wherein we would allow an unemployed (and quite possibly close to unemployable) man in his early forties – a man who didn’t speak a word of English and had a criminal record – come to Canada to live with his sixty-something mother? That’s an outrage worth holding an inquiry over. No wonder my taxes are so high.

Second: I, for one, would like to know what kind of airport security we have in place if this deranged man was allowed to roam about for eight hours unnoticed and unmolested by police or security? The last time I came across the border I was harassed and aggressively bothered by the border services agency over my iPhone. How did a man who didn’t speak a word of English and was apparently in a highly agitated state for some period of time manage to clear customs and then fail to attract the attention of anyone in a position of authority for such a prolonged period of time?

Third: is the horrible abuse suffered by the RCMP members involved – and the police as a whole –as a result of inflammatory media coverage of this incident likely to make the police less aggressive and therefore less able to defend myself and the rest of the general public?

Those are some questions worth asking – but which, regrettably, will be ignored and swept aside in the rush to find someone for the public to blame.

So, President Bush is my Cousin

Seriously. Well, probably.

So, I used my day off today to plug the already fairly-detailed family history that I have into Ancestry.com.

Now, some of this may be off - but, really, it's not that many generations ago. And, of course, there's the question of legitimacy, but...

I'm Adam Yoshida. Hi. My mother is June Yoshida (nee McKinnon). Her father was Hector Walter McKinnnon. His mother was Gertrude McKinnon (nee Barkley). Her mother was Maria Elizabeth Forester.

The first set are well known. I knew my Grandfather. My mother knew her Grandmother.

There are census records which show that Maria Barkley was Gertude Barkley's mother and that Maria Forester married Phillip Ellijah Barkley.

Now, Maria Forester's mother was Lurenia Cowdrey. That - and her father being Daniel Forester - is reflected on Maria Barkley's death cerificate from 1933.

Now, the rest I don't have records for. But, on the other hand, it's all been entered into the database and, based on the specific nature of the dates, places, marriages - it all seems to match.

Lurenia Cowdrey's father was named George Washington Cowdrey. He was born on February 10th, 1785 in Vermont. His father was Samuel Cowdrey, who was born on May 25th, 1766. In turn, his father was Thomas Cowdrey - who was born on September 14th, 1729 in Reading, Massachusetts. In turn, Thomas Cowdrey's mother was Mehitabel Damon, who was born on November 9th 1699. He mother was Lucy Ann Emerson, who was born on October 2nd 1667. He mother was Elizabeth Bulkeley, who was born in 1638 in Massacusetts.

In turn, the father of Elizabeth Bulkeley was Edward Bulkeley, who was born in Bedfordshire, England in 1614.

In turn, Edward Bulkey's father was the Rev. Peter Bulkeley, who was born in 1583 in England.

I realize that this is getting to sound a little like one of the more-boring sections of the Bible... So, the upshot of all of this is that President George Walker Bush in my 10th Cousin, 1 times removed and President George Herbert Walker Bush is my 9th Cousin, 2 times removed.

Also, through the same connection:

1) John Hancock is my third cousin, eight times removed.
2) Canadian Prime Minister Robert Borden is my eighth cousin, five times removed.

Through other family relationships - though ones I'm less certian of than the one that I've outlined above:

1) Revolutionary War hero John Parker is my second cousin (eight times removed).
2) President Taft is my sixth cousin, four times removed.
3) So is President Garfield.
4) President Fillmore is my sixth cousin, five times removed.

I'm also related to two First Ladies:

1) Frances Folsom Cleveland.
2) Grace Coolidge.

Also of note, I seem to have some poetic relations:

1) Ralph Waldo Emerson is my fourth cousin, six times removed.
2) Emily Dickinson is my seventh cousin, four times removed.
3) T.S. Eliot is my ninth cousin, two times removed.
4) Jack London is my tenth cousin, three times removed.

In the technical field, I'm distantly related to Samuel Morse, Robert H. Goddard, and Ferdinand von Zepplin. That last part might explain some stuff.

Alas, no royal bloodlines - beyond the fact that the MacKinnons (the name was changed by my Great-Great Grandfather for reasons which are lost to history) claim descent from the historical King MacBeth (alas, not much like Shakespeare's - that I could really dig).

Robert Dziekanski and the RCMP

Once again, of course, we see in the case of the RCMP and Robert Dziekanski an example of how, when taken out of context, a short video can have a galvanizing effect upon public opinion. I’m not a law enforcement officers – nor have I received law enforcement training. But I do have common sense and, unlike many people, I believe that I have the ability to separate logic from emotion.

Is it a tragedy that Robert Dziekanski died? Of course it is. Should we blame the RCMP members in question for what happened? I believe that we should not.

Watch the whole YouTube video – not the short bits that have been played elsewhere. In this case, a clip without context – and without careful viewing – is meaningless.

In this case, the facts are these: the RCMP was called to respond to a case of a man who appeared to be dangerously out of control. Again, watch the whole video. The man is behaving in an extremely erratic fashion, waving what appears to be a table around and throwing items – presumably other people’s property, I might add – to the ground.

Airport security is called to respond. They quickly conclude that the situation is beyond their pay grade and call for further help.

The RCMP members arrive at the scene. They are confronted by a violent and obviously out-of-control man. When confronted by them, he remains confrontational. According to the RCMP – and there seems to be no reason to disbelieve them on this point – he initially responded and the grabbed a stapler. That’s consistent with what is seen on the video.

At that point – in that split second – the police officers made the decision to use their Tasers. Some question that decision, which is their right. But I think that, frankly, it is simply beyond dispute that – at the point the RCMP arrived and confronted the man – that the use of force to subdue him was necessary.

Now, of course, some might ask why actual physical force was not used. And, within the context of this discussion, two words should obviously be called to mind: Rodney King. The police are, quite understandably, hesitant to use their batons to administer beatings to people – even abundantly necessary beatings – for the obvious reason that someone may be filming and that fifteen out-of-context seconds might then be endlessly replayed on the news. Of course, the risk to the members involved might also be added to that mix – but I personally have little doubt that the move towards the extensive use of Tasers, pepper spray, and so forth by law enforcement is directly related to the desire to avoid the highly unphotogenic results of the traditional beating.

And anyways, based upon his actions, there is little reason to believe that a single blow would have been enough to subdue this man. Based on what I’ve seen, the only way to subdue him through the route described would have been either to wrestle him to the ground and hold him there – something which could have been equally fatal and potentially injurious to the RCMP members – or to beat him unconscious. Or perhaps both.

I’m no shill for the police. Anyone who knows me knows that. I’m not blind. I know that those who enforce the laws are merely human. As it happens, I disagree with a great number of the laws of the land and, in general, feel that the police would be better off finding other things to do than much of what they do on a day-to-day basis (I’m talking, mostly, about various forms of annoying traffic enforcement here and the like).

But, at the same time I believe that it is vitally necessary for us to defend the guardians of society when they require it. These RCMP members responded appropriately to a split-second problem that confronted them. They did their jobs. To demand that they be punished now, to salve the public conscience, is frankly obscene.

No, what blame there is to be laid here must be apportioned elsewhere.

Perhaps some rests with Customs. Maybe some with the airport. Though, I might add, that those whose knees might jerk at the airport for not being able to instantly translate this fellow’s words ought to contemplate the cost of keeping translators for every conceivable language on staff.

While we’re at it, we might also ask some other hard questions. For example – I would be curious to know why, exactly, a forty year-old man who didn’t speak a single word of English was immigrating to Canada to live with his mother. While Mr. Dziekanski may well have been a kind and good man, he doesn’t exactly seem to fit the profile of someone who would be high up the list of people this country’s economy required. Perhaps it might be that some special circumstances underlay his arrival here. But I have no knowledge of any.

I would also add that, as hard as it is for some to hear, a great deal of the blame for what happened must fall upon Mr. Dziekanski. It is taking multicultural naiveté to the absolute extreme to argue that, simply because this man found himself in a foreign airport in a frustrating situation, he was thereby excused from all norms of civilized behaviour.

We have reason to be sad when someone dies in circumstances such as these. But we should not rush to judgement against the police nor should we take leave of our own senses in an orgy of compassion.

FBI Raids L. Ron Paul's Supporters

Apparently the FBI and Secret Service has raided the offices of a company which has been selling "Liberty Dollars" and, more recently, "Ron Paul Dollars" allegedly backed by (or minted in) Gold and Silver.<

Why?  Well, this company was minting coins and issuing paper notes claiming to be "dollars" and which, at least in the case of the coins, might easily have been taken by individuals for notes and coins issued by the Mint or the Federal Reserve.

Of course, some will claim that these actions are no different than a company issuing gift cards or the like - as has already been attempted.  This is utter nonsense.  Companies which issue gift cards and the like don't specifically market them as a replacement for the U.S. dollar.

Neither do they, for that matter, sell them at a discount on a dollar-for-dollar basis and encourage people to make money by putting them into circulation.

Perhaps even more hillariously, given the intended market for these things, it appears that the minted gold, silver, and bronze coins were being told at markups of between 25% and 400% on the actual value of the precious metals contained therein.  The only thing worse than a Goldbug is a stupid Goldbug and, apparently, these people were that in droves.

Now, Ron Paul's smarter supporters will attempt to distance themselves from such a disreputable operation.  They can try and do that, of course - but, frankly, it will be difficult to with fifty pages of teeth gnashing from L. Ron's supporters about the raid.  Moreover, any claim that Ron Paul didn't approve of or support this ought to be viewed skeptically in view of the fact that these people have been marketing these coins using his name and likeness since July at the very earliest.

The Emergency in Vancouver

So far there year there have been at least nineteen gang-related murders in metropolitan Vancouver. There have been four in the last week. Fifteen people have been killed – in what police characterize as four or possibly five simultaneous gang wars – in the last two months. Events are escalating. A major leader of a criminal syndicate was assassinated outside of his home a few days ago. About a week before that, six people – including two civilians – were brutally slain inside of a Surrey apartment. This is a crisis.

Just the other day, the members of two gangs went tearing down the highway shooting at eachother just a little ways down the road from where I live. This wasn’t Compton or downtown Detroit. They were a more or less adjacent to a Stapes, an Office Depot, a Wendys, a theatre super-complex, a massive grocery store, a Toys-R-Us, a McDonalds, an Ikea, a Chevy dealership, and a park.

This is suburban Vancouver, folks. It isn’t supposed to be this way.

For all of the wrong that he did, Pierre Elliot Trudeau did one singular service to the people of Canada. When the threat of an extended urban terrorist insurgency emerged in the form of the FLQ, he stomped upon it with a level of force which even I approve of. Had the movement been allowed to fester, it is entirely possible that Quebec and Canada might well have suffered the extended horror of an Ulster. Quick and decisive action – marked by the overwhelming use of force against an emerging threat – allowed for Canada to escape from evil. Now, I believe, that the time has come for such force to be used again.

“The supreme function of statesmanship,” said Enoch Powell, “is to provide against preventable evils.” Ladies and Gentlemen – what we are faced with today is just such an evil.

The natural reaction of many Canadians, when faced with evil, is to wring our hands and cry that this is simply not the way things ought to be – and then to more or less leave it at that. The modern Canadian is, by nature, passive and submissively accepting of wrongs of all sizes, shapes, and colours. We cry out that this is unacceptable and then we respond by blaming the guns, or by promising research, or by holding community meetings. The police organize some new task force and the media jumps to some new topic and soon we read in the newspapers or hear on the TV that a tenth of our economy is in the illicit drug trade and that there have been twenty murders and fifty shootings as if that was the way things are supposed to be.

This is Vancouver. This isn’t Detroit or Washington, DC. That means a lot of things to a lot of people. But, most significantly, it means that we lack the geography, the methods, and the systems with which to cope with violence on a mass scale. This violence isn’t – and won’t be – largely restricted to ghettos and other places which might be safely written off. It crosses countless ethnic and cultural lines. When gun battles and assassinations are taking place in front of my grocery store and in our richest neighbourhoods, it becomes impossible for us to adopt the attitude of Apartheid-era white South Africans and brush the whole matter off as simply one of the others merely fouling their own nests. As good as they may be, our police have not the staffing, the equipment, the training, or the experience to deal with a problem on this scale. And, even if they did, the court system is – as we all know – entirely either unwilling or unable to deal sternly with offenders of all sorts. At least in American urban cesspools no one is ever operating with a full bench. The police and the courts here already know who at least half of these thugs are – many of them are awaiting trial on one charge or another. It won’t make any difference. We can hardly expect our judicial overlords to be moved to reconsider their leniency by something as petty as blood soaking the streets.

So, the question remains: what is to be done?

The province and the municipalities are nearly powerless in this regard. Their well-meaning and totally ineffectual proposals for all of this can, I believe, be safely ignored. No life was ever saved by a town hall meeting. But, then again, none – so far as I can recall –was ever taken by one either. The power to act here peculiarly rests upon the Federal Government in Ottawa. It is strange indeed that it is incumbent upon the Prime Minister and his Cabinet to deal with anarchy in Vancouver and its environs – that would seem to be the proper function of the Mayor of Vancouver and the Premier of British Columbia – but our nation’s unusual constitutional arrangements make that odd state a reality.

Ottawa says, correctly, that its new anti-crime measures will do some good in combating the crime spree. They’re probably right. It will benefit us some to have some criminals in jail rather than practically none. But, I would add, while we could debate for ages whether these measures go far enough none of them offer any prospect of immediate relief. Implementing these laws will take months – and effecting the change in judicial culture and composition in this country which will make these laws actually useful is the work of many years.

And, of course, the foreign origins and ties of these gangs – most of which appear to be ethnic or national in danger – must be addressed. An expedited effort to detain and deport foreign criminals – and then to keep them out of this country – is vital. But, again, that is an extended project. Moreover, the subject is so uncomfortable and taboo that it seems unlikely that any politician who seriously aspires to national office will dare to speak to the issue directly.

So, the narrower question looms: what can be done today?

The spiralling violence is seemingly beyond the ordinary powers of the police – and certainly beyond the imaginations of our courts. Allowed to escalate, the violence will surely result in more deaths – including the deaths of more civilians. We have no idea how far it will go. It is possible that the criminals who are assaulting our city will tire themselves out, slow down, and that that will be that. But it is equally possible – and far more likely – that these criminals, who are fighting for control of the drug trade in a city which is the gateway from Asia to North America, will wage an escalating battle for supremacy in this land of lax laws and laxer enforcement.

We have a choice here. We can either sit and pray for the best – or we can stand up and fight.

The Prime Minister has the legal right to invoke the updated version of the law that Pierre Trudeau used against the FLQ. It’s now called the Emergencies Act.

As a result of a judicial system which sets criminals free and an immigration system which has stocked our fair city with criminals from all over the Earth, a situation has been created that the ordinary legal and criminal processes is clearly incapable of resolving in a rapid and orderly fashion. The police know who many of these gang members are – they know who the leaders are. But they are forced to stand aside and watch as bullets fly and the innocent fall. That can be changed, if we will it.

The Emergencies Act gives the government the power to “designate and secure protected places.” I propose that the Prime Minister avail himself of the powers granted to him under the act and, using those powers, to order all gang members – and again, the police have a fairly good idea as to who many of these people are, where they live, and what gang they are affiliated with – to remove themselves from the protected area. Indeed, my proposal is that the Prime Minister designate the whole of the Province of British Columbia – save for a small and well-guarded camp – as a protected place. Once this legal formality has taken place, all known gang members who do not voluntarily remove themselves from the designated area could then be detained by the authorities and held for as long as possible. Further, once they are detained, the government could look into deporting many of these people as rapidly as possible.

Some will doubtlessly denounce this proposal as a violation of the rights of criminals. And so, perhaps, it is. It has always been my belief that the protection of the public is an immeasurably higher priority than the rights of bloody murderers and, while I recognize that that opinion is not universally shared, I will not apologize for it. As Trudeau said, “it is more important to keep law and order in the society than to be worried about weak-kneed people.”

What Happened to Alberta?

Seriously, folks – what happened to Alberta and British Columbia? In both provinces the voters elected free enterprise governments and instead they got government by technocrats, devoted to various soft-left pieties.

Apparently the top priorities of the next session of the Alberta Legislature will be allowing for speeding tickets to be issued based upon red light camera photos and banning smoking in public places. Are we talking about Edmonton here or are we talking about Montpellier? A few years ago, we used to admire Albertans for their free-spirited nature. Now, not so much. For all that their rhetoric sometimes offends me – and as much as I wish they had gone further in slashing through the wreckage of a decade of socialism in British Columbia – at least one of the first things that the Liberals did here was to junk the abomination against God and man that is photo radar.

I’ll leave the issue of the obscene great oil cash grab to Ezra and others – to whose superior knowledge I defer. I’ll only say that I often see people –Liberals, NDP’ers, and PC apologists – claim that the Alberta government needs more revenue for “urgently needed infrastructure” or some other such nonsense. I would love for someone to enumerate for me what infrastructure needs cannot be accommodated by the more than $10,000 per capita that the government of Alberta spends each year – or could not have been dealt with by the $7 Billion surplus the government registered last year. Actually, I would really be curious to know – is Ed Stelmach planning on building an Earth-to-Orbit elevator? Because that’s the kind of proposal I could back, the oil companies be damned.

How Health Care Ought to Work

1) 8PM yesterday evening, I chip my tooth while having dinner.
2) 9:45AM, I call my dentist from my desk at work and ask for the earliest possible appointment.
3) 11AM, appointment.
4) 11:30AM, dentist presents me with bill for $39 (1/4 of the cost, per my insurance through work).
5) 11:31AM, I pay bill and leave, tooth fixed.

I'd note that was all possible because, in Canada, we have dentistry entirely in the free market. That is to say, it's not part of Medicare. Simple - relatively cheap - quick, and reliable. I'd note that even if I needed a more serious procedure, it would have been done with equal rapidity.

How Many Divisions Has the House?

In discussing the question of the distribution of war powers in the United States, this colulmn from George Will throughly misses the point.

Will writes of various means by which the Congress might cut off funding or otherwise attempt to stop or prevent a war and then says that, "All this refutes Rudy Giuliani's recent suggestion that the president might have "the inherent authority to support the troops" even if funding were cut off."

I don't deny that, in a legal and strictly constitutional sense, that Will might well be right - but the question here is not, and has never been, one strictly of law.  In an 1861 address to the Congress, Abraham Lincoln asked, "are all the laws but one to go unexecuted and the Government itself go to pieces lest that one be violated?" 

The Constitution and the laws are not a suicide pact.

Will - and others - seem to willfully ignore the core question, insofar as any Congressional effort to force an American surrender or otherwise cripple the defense of the United States is concerned.  Put simply - how many divisions has the House?

Mark Steyn has earlier discussed the concept of a "cold Civil War" - and a closely related question, one which I have posed in the past, is whether there is a serious danger of that cold war becoming a hot one.  This would seem to be one such method.  In seeking to force an American defeat in Iraq - or elsewhere in the world - the Democrats in Congress would be provoking a Constitutional crisis.  They have no way to force the President to obey their will if the President correctly chooses to ignore orders and decrees which would result in the defeat and humilation of country he is sworn to defend. 

Indeed, looking at the approval ratings of the Congress, the more historically-minded members ought to reflect that even the Long Parliament was probably more popular at the end of its days.

Bin Laden: We're Losing in Iraq

I'm amazed by the media's ability to ignore what's happening on the ground in Iraq when it fails to suit their agenda.  Over at The Corner Victor Davis Hanson compares the turn-around to that which occuered during the summer of 1864.<

The comparison is, I believe, an apt one.  Some of the similarities, which he doesn't discuss, are worth noting.

1) In the summer of 1864 everyone, including Abraham Lincoln himself, believed that his chances of being re-elected were practically nil.

2) In 1864 the Democrats chose General George B. McClellan as their nomineee - and adopted an extreme anti-war platform which he promptly reupidated. 

3) In 1864, as I believe is the case today, the enemy knew that it had no hope of a military victory - and was therefore pinning its hopes upon a political triumph.

Now, we see this from the Long War Journal.  It was part of Bin Laden's (or whoever is playing him these days) latest audio tape:

In closing, I tell our people in Iraq, the patient ones garrisoned on the first line of the religion and sanctities of the Muslims: the malice has increased and the darkness has become pitch black, and with the likes of you, nations reinforce themselves and climb summits.

If only our friends in the drive-by media would admit to it with as much candor as the other enemies of the West.