Canadian Cincinnatus

Happy Lenin’s Birthday! er, I mean Earth Day

Once again, its that time of year. Every year on this day, I take the time out to remind everyone that April 22 - Earth Day - is Vladimir Lenin’s birthday.

Lest you think this is just a 1 in 365 coincidence exploited by right-wing hate-mongers such as myself, consider the fact that the first Earth Day - April 22, 1970 – was the one hundredth anniversary of Lenin’s birth.

To be fair, Earth Day is increasingly being celebrated on the spring equinox. This is a positive development that helps distance the environmentalist movement from the ideals of a bloodthirsty killer.

Organic farming causes yet another E. coli outbreak

A friend once told me of an apple he forgot on the counter. After a couple of days in the sun, it still hadn’t rotted. He concluded that there is something wrong with that. The problem being that the apple was so full of preservatives that he didn’t consider it a real apple any more. The implication being that there is something wrong with preservatives.

One of the negative consequences of the modern world is that our mastery of biology and chemistry has so effectively shielded us from the bad effects of the natural world that we have become complacent. In our complacency, we sometimes indulge in Rousseauian romantic fantasies about nature. In this make-believe world, the words ‘natural’ and ‘good’ are synonyms.

This is of course not true but it is self-defeating, as the latest E. coli outbreak in Europe illustrates. We now have proof that the E. coli originated from an organic farm. Many civilized people today, particularly those who live in the big city, assume that nature is benign. It is not. The universe is indifferent, and it requires real work and constant vigilance to keep us safe and sound. Most farmers and other people who work the land are aware of nature’s dark side because they see nature up close every day. Urban hipsters - cocooned downtown - never experience Mother Nature’s cruelty. As a result of their antiseptic environment, they are scarcely aware of all the technical processes that must work around the clock to keep them healthy. This creates within them the kind of arrogance that the ignorant sometimes exhibit.

One thing is for sure though, with the current popularity of romantic illusions about nature, we can expect more of these completely avoidable outbreaks of disease in the future.

 

Happy Lenin’s Birthday! er, I mean Earth Day

Once again, its that time of year. Every year on this day, I take the time out to remind everyone that April 22, Earth Day, is Vladimir Lenin’s birthday.

Lest you think this is just a 1 in 365 coincidence exploited only by right-wing hate-mongers such as myself, consider the fact that the first Earth Day - April 22, 1970 – was the one hundredth anniversary of Lenin’s birth.

To be fair, Earth Day is increasingly being celebrated on the spring equinox. This is a positive development that helps distance the environmentalist movement from the ideals of a bloodthirsty killer.

Who the BBC considers the world’s worst environmental villain

Here is a youtube clip from some BBC talk show about the man they consider to be the world’s worst environmental villain of all time. Their pick: Thomas Midgley, a mechanical engineer and chemist who happened to discover that adding lead into gasoline reduces engine knocking and who also invented ozone layer-destroying CFC’s.

I am less interested in commenting on Midgley and more on those idiot talking heads condemning his career and gloating over his untimely, horrible death. To me, these jabbering dolts illustrate by their shallow, trendy, moralistic and bloody-minded preening all that is wrong with the environmental movement today - which has degenerated into little more than an anti-human, anti-progress Ludditism. The only difference between their ilk and the early 19^th century handloom weavers, who went around smashing automated textile mills that threatened their livelihood, was that those weavers had a useful skill. These obnoxious TV personalities have no useful talent at all.

Thomas Midgley was a skilled engineer trying to build a better world. These coddled buffoons have never known anything but a better world and are too clueless to know how fortunate they are; and they are even more clueless on how to make it even better, or even how to maintain what they inherited.

It is no wonder that George Orwell, the author of the dystopic classic 1984, patterned the Ministry of Truth, where his protagonist Winston Smith worked, after the BBC.

 

The Gulf oil spill and Environmentalism

It has been a widespread observation in conservative and alternate media circles that if this crisis had been happening under George W Bush’s watch, then all hell would be breaking loose now in the media and among the tree-hugger crowd. There would be mass demonstrations daily – many violent, ‘die-ins’ and lots and lots of large paper mache puppets of President Bush and Tony Hayward. Indeed it has been a relief that the reaction to this crisis has been so level-headed.

However there is a big danger for the environmentalist movement in this.

Think back to the Bill Clinton scandals and feminism. When President Clinton was hauled up before the courts in what was really just a fairly typical sexual harassment case, the feminists sided with ‘their President’ against ‘their law’. All of a sudden, all of the arguments used previously by conservatives to argue against this onerous, unjust anti-man law were employed by the feminists to provide cover for Clinton.

As a result, Bill Clinton survived comfortably but the feminist movement was left permanently discredited. The spectacle of feminists carrying water for a powerful lothario simply because they agreed with his left-wing politics demonstrated to everybody what conservatives knew all along, that feminism is really only the ladies auxiliary of the left. As a result, regular college-age women stopped identifying with organized Feminism, which has in recent years become the exclusive club of unhinged, man-hating lesbians.

Getting back to the Gulf: by any objective standards, this oil spill is about the worst possible environmental catastrophe short of a nuclear war – an epic underwater gush of oil, already 60 days old, with no end in sight, and with the potential to grievously pollute thousands of miles of American coastlines. I mean, if this isn’t a red light emergency for environmentalism, then what is?

Unless, of course, the environment is really a cover for other, unstated, priorities. If the environmentalists are seen to care more about Obama’s poll numbers than they are about mother nature, then it will be graphic demonstration to all concerned that they are like a fresh tomato, which is green at first, but can be counted on to turn bright red when left in the sunlight.

Gulf oil spill demonstrates the ineffectiveness of excessive government regulation

ig government cheerleaders wants to portray the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico as a failure of ‘unregulated’ free enterprise – a classic case of what happens of private companies running amok without oversight. While it is almost certainly true that negligence on the part of British Petroleum caused this disaster, it is also true that this disaster is a failure of ‘big regulation’ as well. Let me explain.

For starters, there is a phenomenon that economists call regulatory capture. This is when regulators and legislators get into a cozy and mutually beneficial relationship where regulations are bent in the regulatees favour. All of the presents showered on the Department of Interior officials by BP are evidence of this. When control freaks push for more and more regulation of ever increasing complexity for the public good, the tacit assumption is that the regulators and legislators work selflessly for the public good. But what allows them to assume that? Have we found angels in the form of politicians and bureaucrats? I don’t think so. In the real world, the people burdened with the regulations have the biggest in the regulatory process. The rest of the public lazily assumes that the problem has being taken care of, and indeed it has, just not quite the way they think it has been. The more regulations you have, the worse this problem gets because the legal framework gets more obtuse and complicated. For instance, how many special favours are buried in the 2,700 pages of Obamacare?

As an example, take the remote arctic community of Hall Beach. The town is partially dry in that there is an alcohol committee that decides who gets a license to import booze and who doesn’t. The joke around town was that all the biggest drunks are on that committee. And why wouldn’t they be? They’ve got a big incentive to make sure that they get to keep drinking. If you don’t drink, you don’t really care enough to attend all those boring committee meetings.

A bigger example: Bill Clinton’s legal crusade against big tobacco in the 1990’s. The assumption in the media covering the story was that these lawsuits hurt big tobacco, because they are forced to make restitution for Medicare expenses incurred by aging smokers. Wrong. The tobacco companies benefited handsomely. How? Though they did have to pay hefty penalties to the states, their payoff was that upstart competitors were banned from setting up shop. You see it would be ‘unfair’ because those new companies would not have any restitution to make. Not having sold cigarettes before, they were not yet responsible for any medical bills and therefore weren’t a cash cow for the states yet. Those fines were money well spent as far as big tobacco was concerned because their payoff was a government guaranteed monopoly.

The second problem with excessive regulation is that regulations often have unintended consequences that actually make the problem they are intended to fix even worse. Take oil drilling. Drilling on land in the ANWAR region of Alaska? Banned for environmental reasons. Drilling for oil in the shallow continental shelf of the west coast? Banned, same reasons. Drilling for oil in the shallow continental shelf of the east coast? Banned. Shale oil production in Wyoming and the Dakotas? Banned. What’s left? Drilling for oil off the continental shelf in extremely deep water, where fixing blowouts is extremely difficult – that’s what’s left. Considering the cost and complexity of drilling there, nobody would be doing it if they had been allowed access to oil in the much less challenging regions that are now off-limits. 

The third problem is the stupidity of the regulations themselves. Quite often regulations concentrate on irrelevant minutiae while leaving critical issues untouched. For instance, does anybody believe that BP drilling operation was completely unregulated before the Deepwater Horizon rig blew up? Of course not. Likely, they were subject to thousands and thousands of pages of regulations covering all kinds of details – most trivial. In all probability that’s why the Department of the Interior gave them a safety award. All those forms and all those requirements were filled out - to a t. The only problem was that those regulations left the elephant in the room – what do you do when the blowout valve fails? – untouched.

 

Happy Lenin’s Birthday! er, I mean Earth Day

Once again, its that time of year. Every year on this day, I take the time out to remind everyone that April 22 - Earth Day - is Vladimir Lenin’s birthday.

Lest you think this is just a 1 in 365 coincidence exploited only by right-wing hate-mongers such as myself, consider the fact that the first Earth Day - April 22, 1970 – was the one hundredth anniversary of Lenin’s birth.

To be fair, Earth Day is increasingly being celebrated on the spring equinox. This is a positive development that helps distance the environmentalist movement from the ideals of a bloodthirsty killer.

 

Environmentalist Fires Opening Salvo in War on Children

The former head of Britain's green party, Jonathon Porritt, has taken extreme environmentalism to its logical conclusion: government control of reproduction.

Porritt is a big fan of China's one child per family policy because, "at least 400 million births have been averted ... that's the biggest single CO2 (carbon dioxide) abatement achievement since Kyoto."

What Porritt ignores is the human rights crimes that have come with this policy, including forced abortions, sterilization, infanticide and child abandonment.  Adult women, outnumbered 118 males to every female, have an increased chance of rape and abduction for forced marriage.

Perhaps he'd argue that his policy is for two children to be allowed, so that maybe everyone will opt for one boy and one girl, but two is still actually negative population growth, since not every child makes it to adulthood and not every adult will have even one child.

Forcing a reduction in the population of the planet may sound fine to environmentalists, but what Porritt is unwittingly advocating is cultural suicide: he's only concerned about Western governments limiting births.

Another environmentalist, David Bell of York University, says that the amount of environmental damage caused by eight North Americans equals 160 people in the Third World.  His conclusion is that we don't need to worry about limiting developing world populations.

This might make sense if populations were static and the developing world stopped developing, but even with the economic downturn, China and India will move ahead.

For instance, Tata motors of India offers a car for $4,690 US, still expensive for most Indians, but much cheaper than a GM, Chrysler or even Toyota car.  How does Tata do it?  No frills, including no radio, no union and no pollution controls.  They are the most polluting cars in the world.  India will soon be the most populous country in the world, so if even a small percentage end up owning Tatas, their carbon footprint will increase substantially.

What the environmentalists also forget is that populations migrate from dense to less dense.  Borders are porous, and as Western populations age and reduce, we'll be forced to rely more heavily than ever on immigrants for the labor pool, and herein lies the cultural suicide: fundamentalist Muslims, for example, don't care about climate change or human rights, but they do believe in having children.

Even less fanatical new Canadians won't worry about global warming (oh, sorry, global climate change). Their day to day concerns involve struggling to find their footing in a strange culture, heating their new Western homes, and buying cars.  Their last concern will be their carbon footprint.  In their home countries, riding public transit was a humiliating necessity, not a sanctimonious badge of honor.  Here they will measure success by their cars, just like we did before the climate change hysteria.  My  Mexican-Canadian neighbor owns a shiny new hummer.

Also, new Canadians from warm places like the Middle East, Africa and India are not panicked by the thought of milder and shorter Canadian winters.

Gradually, these new Canadians will be a voting block, and environmentalists, despite desperate "education" campaigns, will find themselves sidelined by middle class concerns.  It may be only a few decades from now that highways will experience a renaissance, and environmentalists, aging and impotent, will only be able to watch in rage as downtown expressways are constructed.

There is, of course, a simple way of curbing global population growth: export Western democracy and values to the developing world.  In every country that women have the right to vote, to drive, to employment, to choose to marry or not, and access to birth control, population growth is negative or zero.

Rather than committing cultural suicide with restrictive government regulations on reproduction in Western countries, where population growth is already negative, it's time to export our culture and values to the developing world.  This would be a wise policy whether you believe the greatest threat to our society is climate change or population demographics.

Mike Downtown