Canadian Cincinnatus

David Miller’s conflict of interest

Toronto’s five-week-old garbage strike is over and it seems that the unions have gotten 90% of what they wanted. The only real substantive concession they made is that new hires will not be able to collect and bank 18 sick days a year that they are able to cash in upon retirement. This is a long-term savings to the city, but because all present employees will continue to be able to collect sick days there will be little immediate or midterm cost savings.

Unfortunately this is what happens when a politician, who is as heavily dependent on union money and volunteers as Miller, leads the government’s side of the negotiations. That is why this strike was so bad for him. David Miller was caught on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand he can’t afford to piss off the voter, on the other he needs the unions for his reelection campaign. But this situation is bad for the city too because Toronto was not being represented during the strike by somebody who could zealously and single-mindedly represent the city’s interest with a clean conscience.

Now as long as it is legal for mayoral candidates to accept contributions and volunteers from city workers unions there is nothing illegal about any of this. Therefore, the solution to this problem does not reside in the courts but rather at the ballot box. So if you are a Toronto resident, make sure that on November 2010 you go out and vote for whomever is most likely to defeat Miller.

Finally, a right-wing conspiracy theory that Obama likes

Among fringe elements of the far right, there is a group called the ‘birther’s who are nursing the theory that Obama is ineligible to serve as President because he was not born in Hawaii, i.e. that he is not a natural born American citizen.

On the face of it, it seems plausible considering Obama’s exotic family story. However there is one wee problem with the theory: it has been thoroughly debunked. The editors of the conservative flagship magazine, the National Review, have seen a photograph of his Hawaiian birth certificate, they have quoted its serial number (010641) and announcements of the Blessed One’s birth have been discovered in the Honolulu Star and Honolulu Advertiser. If there really were a conspiracy to plant secret agent Obama into the White House, he must be a really deep mole for his handlers to have planted corroborating evidence in newspapers as far back as 1961. No, as far as any reasonable person is concerned, the theory has been falsified so that from now on the burden of proof resides on the conspiracy theorist. In other words, put up or shut up.

But nevertheless, this kook fringe has been getting a lot of attention - almost entirely from the mainstream press. Take this story from R Emmett Tyrell, editor of the American Spectator. He got a call from some mainstream news show to do an interview on the subject. He said no problem; his reporters had investigated the matter and had come up with proof that Obama is indeed a qualified to assume the Presidency. Their response was, oh…, and that’s the last he heard from them. Obviously considering the fact that the American Spectator was on the leading edge when it came to exposing Bill Clinton’s scandals in the 90’s several years ahead of everybody else, they figured Tyrell would itching to say that Obama wasn’t born in the States. Once they found out that he thought the whole theory was bogus, they lost interest in him.

In other words, the only reason the mainstream press are into this theory at all is not because they believe it - they don’t, they’re in the tank for Obama – they figure it’s just the kind of craziness that can be used to discredit by association more serious criticisms of Obama, critiques that have substance behind them. Like for instance (to pick a few items at random), Obama’s suspicious house deal with the now convicted Chicago political bagman Tony Rezko; Michelle Obama’s job at the University of Chicago Hospital, the salary of which seemed to be closely correlated with Obama’s own career trajectory; or Obama’s precise relationship with former Gov. Blagoyevich. These are the things that need to be investigated and talked about.

It is therefore gratifying that the conservative press is not letting itself get played by the MSM and is closing ranks behind the fact that Obama was born in the USA.

A man’s home is his castle, even if the man is a race-baiting demagogue

Everybody has been talking about the black Harvard “African American Studies” professor who was arrested at his home by the police. However, until I read this article by Radley Balko, almost all of the discussion I heard centered either on the race issue or on how Obama mishandled it when he weighed in on the subject, perhaps because race is still such a sensitive issue in America today. But as Balko has pointed out, there is another important issue highlighted by this incident, one becoming increasingly important with the ratcheting up of the drug war – and that is abuse of police power.

From what we now know about the incident, anti-black profiling did not play a part in Sgt. Crowley’s decision-making when he investigated a possible B&E that evening. He went the scene because a person had reported a black man breaking into a neighbouring house (obviously not recognizing the owner). When Crowley came up to the house, he evidently sized up Gates and concluded that he was not a burglar (likely from his age and well kept appearance). How do we know this? Simple. If Sgt. Crowley had thought otherwise, he would have drawn his sidearm and arrested Gates at gunpoint, no questions asked.

Now what followed was a torrent of racial insults hurled at Crowley by the good professor that was as unnecessary as it was unbecoming. This ultimately resulted in the arrest of Gates by Sgt. Crowley for disorderly conduct. It was at this point that Crowley abused his authority. For while it is indisputable that Gates’ behaviour was ‘tumultuous’, it is also clear that arresting Gates was unnecessary to preserve the public peace and only payback by Crowley for the verbal abuse he suffered. Crowley had said Gates was uncooperative, but this is untrue. Gates did cooperate, albeit minimally. When asked to show his ID to the police, he did that, proving that he was the homeowner. He did not need to do any more. There was no danger of his ‘tumultuous’ behaviour igniting a race riot in the upper middle class white neighbourhood where he lived. Of course, he didn’t need to insult the police but disrespecting cops is not a crime, and, in a free society, it shouldn’t be.

If, after proving his identity, the police has simply retreated to their cruisers and left, the onlookers would have soon also departed, leaving Gates alone, howling at the moon on his front porch looking foolish.

Look, I have no illusions about who Professor Gates is. He is a profoundly ugly man who teaches an intellectual flim-flam subject - both of which are unbecoming for Harvard University to be associated with. It is also likely true that this arrest made Gates’ day because it gave him some street cred, highly valued in the race industry where he works.

Nevertheless, a man is still entitled to be obnoxious in his own home to whomever he likes. 

Society’s alpha lemmings

In a departure from the usual fare on this website, I would like to discuss the fashion industry. I do so because I want to deal with an argument used by the fashion industry that has long bothered me, which is, that being fashionable makes a person look better.

I have never believed this to be true. On the contrary, I believe that fashion is merely a manifestation of one’s lemming instinct, i.e. a desire to conform to what those around one wears, but only recently has a proof for this proposition occurred to me. A simple example can illustrate it. Take the hemline of women’s skirts. If the purpose of fashion were to make people look better than it would always be fashionable for women with nice legs to wear short skirts and for women with not nice legs (think Hillary Clinton) to wear long dresses. But this is not so. It is fashionable either for all women, regardless of the beauty of their legs, to wear short skirts or for all women, regardless of their legs, to wear long skirts. In other words, at any given point in time, some women are forced to wear clothes that are less than suitable to them only because that is what all the other women are doing.

This means that the motivation for fashionable people is not so much to look better but to blend in more with their surroundings. This makes the people at the top of the fashion world alpha lemmings, who are at the top of the fashion food chain only because they have the ability to predict what will be in fashion for beta lemmings next year.

But what about us non-lemmings, what should we do? We could walk around purposely avoiding current styles, but then we will just end up looking weird, which is distracting. No, I think we should follow the teachings of Thomas Jefferson who said: “In matters of fashion, swim with the current. In matters of conscience, stand like a rock.” In other words, hold your nose and go with flow but without going to any ridiculous extremes or spending too much time or money on style. In this way your fashion sense does not adversely affect more important matters but you do not spend too much effort on it either. 

The Passion of moderate conservatives

Principled conservatives (i.e. right-wing lunatics) are constantly being entreated by their moderate betters to ‘moderate’ their principle because it is, we are told, only through moderation that electoral success can be achieved.

There are a number of things wrong with this prescription but the one I want to focus on in this post is the fact that conservatives tend to be punished by voters when the liberal policies they have adopted backfire.

A case in point is California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. He started out in 2003 campaigning against the corrupt spendthrift Democrat Governor, Gray Davis. Fiscal conservatism was his byword. But after the November, 2005 special election, where a series of propositions he supported were defeated, he ‘moved to the center’ and began governing like a spendthrift liberal. Initially this worked and his popularity improved. Even left-wing actors like Warren Beatty praised him, saying the ‘new’ governator is better than the nasty old one. When Rush Limbaugh criticized him for this move, Schwarzenegger called into the program and gave an ‘ends justify the means’ defence, i.e. jettisoning conservative principles was worth it for the temporal success that it bought him.

And it really did seem like a swell bargain up until about a year ago. But now that California is so broke that it is forced to pay people with IOU’s, I bet it doesn’t seem like a good idea any more.

What RINO’s, mavericks and our own red tories up here in the Dominion of Canada forget is that principles, when they are applied, have consequences. Good principles lead to good policies which have good consequences (like, say, prosperity); just as bad policies inevitably lead to bad consequences (like bankruptcy and economic ruin). As a leader, you are ultimately judged on your results, not how well your ideas initially focus grouped.

Oh...and the best part? All your new allies will desert you the moment the bottom falls out of your program because even liberals don’t want to be associated with failure. But since you belong to a different party from them, this is easy enough to do. Instead of blaming your failure on the liberal policies they recommended you adopt, they would rather cite the fact that you are conservative – “see what happens when you vote conservative”. In other words, the very principles you rejected to ‘move to the center’ will be proclaimed as the cause of your demise.

When a politician loses both the battle of principles and the battle of popularity, he departs the scene utterly alone as a complete failure.

That is the fate of the conservative appeaser.

 

Toronto’s striking garbage workers need better PR skills

Watching the local news reports of striking picketers holding up residents at Toronto’s temporary dump sites - forcing homeowners to wait 15 minutes per car, making people walk their garbage into the site, etc. – I find myself wondering just how stupid they are. 

I know what they - in their limited intellectual capacity – think are trying to do. By harassing and blocking citizens, they believe that this will put pressure on the city. And they are, but not the way they think. When Torontonians hear stories of little old ladies being subject to verbal insults and people with physical disabilities forced to hobble across the picket lines with their garbage bags, taxpayers get angry – but at them, not the city. They don’t say to themselves, “Why doesn’t the city cave into the strikers’ demands, thereby allowing them to keep cashing in their accumulated unused sick days when they retire. After all, it’s a small price to pay for labour peace.” No. Instead they say, “What pampered princes. Who the hell gets to cash in their unused sick days, and who else gets 18 paid sick days a year? Screw ‘em. Order them back or privatize garbage collection!” That’s what they think.

What the strikers don’t understand – because they are full of indignation about their own rights – is that the highest court in the land is the court of public opinion. This is the court that ultimately decides matters like this and it is a court from which there is no appeal. 

What union members should be doing is helping people drop off their garbage. Instead of yelling at the little old lady who showed up at the dumpsite in her 1975 Dodge Dart, they should help her unload the garbage from her trunk so that she goes home thinking, “What a nice young man, helping me get rid of my garbage.” That’s how you win the public relations war.

By behaving like overpaid hooligans, they present the worst possible face to the public. They make themselves look like the kind of people you want to see get it good and hard 

The malignant influence of Michael Jackson

In an interview Michael Jackson made at the time he got off the second time from child molestation charges, he defended his habit of sleeping with young boys with the statement that it is a sweet, charming activity - going so far as to get indignant at the suggestion that there was anything improper in any of it. He also stated that he was interested in children (platonically, of course) because they are innocent, pure and uncorrupted, as adults inevitably are.

While this tripe can be viewed as just a cynical cover for his pedophilic habits, lets, for the sake of argument, take him at his word. Consider what he represents over and above his pederasty: Michael Jackson is somebody who spent his entire adult life trying to remain a child. He even called his home Neverland, after the place in J. M. Barrie’s story Peter Pan where little children don’t grow up. Jackson was fascinated with the story because he didn’t want to grow up himself, which brings us to a major but overlooked reason why Jackson was such a bad influence on society.

If he were just a prominent pederast, that would be bad enough, but in this case his bad influence would be limited to only that small percentage of the populace who have the potential to be attracted to children. Granted these days our society is doing a better job of enabling that potential than in the good ‘ol days, there are nevertheless only so many potential kiddy-diddlers out there.

The bigger problem is that Michael Jackson represented the cult of Innocence. In this secular religion, Innocence (i.e. cluelessness) is held to be the highest value. The greatest sin is the type of critical rationalism that is its opposite and that is most closely associated with adult behaviour. It is easily confounded with cynicism, which is a Bad Thing. Since Innocence can be equated with childhood and cynicism with adulthood, what Jackson helped normalize is adult infantilism.

A good example of this phenomenon are all those 40+ year old Star Wars/Lord of the Rings/Harry Potter fans who dress up in their favourite costumes at fantasy conventions. This video from an overnight lineup at a Star Wars movie premier illustrates these silly people very well.

It is an unfortunate fact that many adults in our society prefer to live in a childhood fantasy world rather than face cold hard reality. This is not a good thing. First, it is a form of intellectual and moral laziness and is most decidedly not a virtue. And second, it means that a significant portion of our adult population is not mentally equipped to deal with the real world.

Notice that this phenomenon is entirely confined to the developed world: North America, Western Europe and the Pacific Rim countries. People who grew up in Eastern Europe, China or India do not suffer from this affliction because most of them have been ‘mugged by reality’ too often to allow themselves this luxury. They know from first hand experience that life is a series of disasters to be navigated around. Because we have inherited such a superior society and government, and because all the heavy lifting required to create it has been done so long ago, it is possible for us to believe that a good outcome is the default conclusion in life. Unfortunately, even a society as well constructed as ours requires periodic maintenance to prevent the centrifugal forces latent within it from destroying it. Such work is unglamorous and requires a liberal application of sober realism. Utopian dreaming is positively detrimental to it. But if society is not maintained on a regular basis, it will gradually fall into disrepair and disintegrate over time. History is filled with examples of great civilizations that fell apart because the citizenry allowed complacency and laziness to get the better of them.

Lets take some bad consequences from recent times that have been caused by adults shirking their real-world consequences. One prominent example is the election of Barack Obama. His empty Hope and Change message was perfectly crafted to appeal to the infantilist sentiment. In 2008, a significant segment of the American people were tired of the hard slog in Iraq and Afghanistan and so willingly suspended disbelief so they could indulge in the Obama fantasy. They could have asked hard questions, such as what exactly is he planning to change, or what policy changes is he contemplating to create hope. Without concrete answers to these questions, any adult would be justified in concluding that Hope and Change is just cant. But instead, America’s adult children felt a sense of moral superiority because they thought of themselves as enablers of his beautiful fantasy. Well, now we are beginning to get answers to the questions that should have been asked and they ain’t pretty. But that’s what happens when decision makers aren’t grounded in sober reality.

Another example is alternate energy. Wind and sun are very problematic sources of energy with many limitations but, because they are part of a beautiful green fantasy, prosaic engineering details are swept aside. By imposing their fantasy world on the rest of us, the greens have taken what is essentially an engineering problem and turned it into a worthless but temporarily uplifting children’s crusade. The only real result is that many precious resources will end up being wasted on things whose worthlessness was evident right at the beginning. Recently European countries like Germany, Denmark and Sweden have discovered that wind and solar power cannot possibly provide for their electricity needs. After spending billions on wind turbine subsidies, they are now feverishly constructing coal-fired power plants and are rethinking their moratoriums on nuclear power. In contrast, France has a much smaller carbon offset right now because they have been soberly and systematically building nuclear power plants all along.

Unfortunately, I think we will remain stuck with our adult children until social conditions worsen to the point where people cannot indulge in their fantasy worlds any longer. For the rest of us, this means we will end up with the government Michael Jackson fans deserve.

Obama and David Miller are destructive geniuses, not idiots

When one considers all the misbegotten things that Obama has done in the past 6 month’s - passing the $787 billion porkulus bill, passing the $410 billion omnibus spending bill, getting the Fed to buy Treasury Bills en masse (which is, in effect, printing money), needlessly offending allies, wooing enemies like Ahmadinejad while ignoring their democracy loving opposition, and now cap-and-trade (a huge energy tax, plus corporate welfare) and comprehensive health care reform (a massive entitlement introduced at a time when the US is dead broke) - one is tempted to conclude that he is an idiot.

But one would be wrong. If Obama were merely incompetent, he wouldn’t be systematically pursuing his goals. Instead, he would be flailing about, reacting to events, behaving like someone totally out of his depths. In short, he would be acting like Stephane Dion or John Tory. But whatever you think of Obama’s policies (and I have the gravest reservations about them), he is not doing that. He is proactively and deliberately working towards farsighted goals. This is normally a mark of high statecraft. Unfortunately, there is just one wee, itsy bitsy problem: the principles guiding him are completely rotten and will lead to disaster on many fronts. This is why he is a destructive genius.

Toronto’s mayor David Miller is in the same league. Since 2003 he has done innumerable stupid things but he has never just sputtered about, captive to events. He has pursued his dumb agenda with the same far-sighted determination and skill that Obama has shown.

Take one example coming up: the light-rail network Miller wants to set up across the city. To realize how truly bad this plan is, one needs to go to St Clair Ave West to see the destructive effects that the streetcar right-of-way has had on the local community. For one thing, there is nothing rapid about it. Light rail cars are only just fancy, expensive streetcars, no faster than busses but just as inflexible to the demands of other road traffic – which is its only real attraction to Miller. The streetcar right-of-way that Miller shoved down the throats of local residents who hate the thing is a nightmare for traffic, choking off car traffic along St. Clair West. This is Miller’s real objective. He hates cars and his light rail network is his plan to ratchet up traffic jams by several orders of magnitude. He thinks that if he makes Toronto’s traffic bad enough, people will have no choice but take his ‘light rail’ white elephants. Oh, and the best part, it will cost the city and the province billions to build.

Toronto’s own destructive genius at work.

 

Why no one wants the province to legislate an end to Toronto’s garbage strike except David Miller

Last week, the new leader of the Ontario PC Party came out against back-to-work legislation for Toronto’s two week old garbage strike. My first instinct was to think: great, he’s wimping out, just like John Tory. Then I realized, no, he’s actually making the smart play.

David Miller would like nothing better than for others to legislate to end the strike (or to demand such action). Miller’s currently on the horns of a dilemma because of his conflict-of-interest situation with municipal unions. On the one hand, the citizens of Toronto are pissed at the pampered garbage collectors and their unbelievable sick leave benefits. On the other hand, he is completely dependent on these same unions for his re-election campaign. If he asks Queen’s Park to legislate them back, all the union support he has enjoyed in past elections will vapourize in 2010. The only good way out of this situation for him is if somebody else plays the heavy with the union.

I think Hudak realizes this and is deliberately staying out of the way while his enemy self-destructs (and make no mistake about it, Miller is an enemy).

In related news, yesterday Premier Dalton McGuinty said that he is also in no hurry to legislate strikers back to work. I guess he’s had also enough of Miller, in this case his constant carping for provincial money. Forcing David Miller to come grovelling to Queen’s Park begging for back-to-work legislation would certainly put an end to those demands – after November, 2010.

It couldn’t happen to a nicer socialist demagogue.

The Ayatollahs lose, no matter how the Iranian revolution turns out

Though revolutions are notoriously difficult to predict, it’s looking more and more certain that the good guys will be crushed under the boot-heels of the authoritarians, like they were in Tiananmen Square.

For a brief moment, when images of the protester Neda - who was shot in the head by the Basiji - spread around the world, it looked like the regime could topple. Now, thanks to the death of that worthless celebrity narcissist, Michael Jackson, the mullahs now have all the cover they need to crush the Iranian people without anybody noticing. Damn you Michael!

Nevertheless, even if the apocalyptic looney-tunes get to keep their day jobs, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been thoroughly discredited by recent events. Up until now, their big attraction to Moslems around the world is the ray of hope they have offered to all those Moslems who are currently oppressed by the Middle East’s secular tyrannies (which is why Obama’s outreach to these worthless governments is so misguided and bound to be unproductive). What is that selling point? As Mark Steyn has pointed out, we have to admit that until the recent sham election, Iran had a kind of political culture that most other Middle Eastern countries - from Saudi Arabia to Mubarak’s Egypt to Assad’s Syria – utterly lacked (Iraq being a notable but unmentionable exception). This credibility allowed them to successfully peddle their Islamofascism internationally.

This is now finished. The scenes of riot squads in Tehran that are circulating around the internet have ensured that the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer be seen as the longed-for future of Islam, the second caliphate. It no longer offers Moslems any hope. Iran’s mullahs have been demoted by these events to be just another claque of petty, prosaic dictators clinging to power by their fingernails, just like all the other thugs who run Middle East countries.