Canadian Cincinnatus

Toronto Star columnist runs into David Miller’s ‘gun free’ Toronto

Toronto Star columnist Jim Fiorito was awoken early the other morning by a legion of Toronto police officers (question: was the ETF there?), who were there to take away his firearm. What was wrong – was the gun prohibited? No – it was a run-of-the-mill 20-gauge duck gun. Was it unregistered? No – the reason the police knew about it in the first place was because it was registered. The crime: his firearms license (his PAL) had expired.

The upside of this is that a Toronto Star columnist now has first-hand knowledge that the real target of David Miller’s Project Safe Streets is law-abiding taxpayers like him – who are hounded for paperwork violations, not gangbangers. If he is able to put two and two together, he will now understand why Mayor Miller has been utterly impotent as a crime fighter.

Background knowledge:

1.  Possession and Acquisition Licenses (PAL’s) are valid for five years (like passports).

2.  Other than the expiry date on the card, no notification that a person’s license is about to expire is sent. The onus is on the license holder to be observant.

3.  Once a renewal application is received, the amount of time it takes to process the application varies from 1 month to 9 months, depending on the vagaries of the gun control bureaucracy.

4.  If your license expires because it took an unreasonable amount of time for the Canadian Firearms Center to process your application, the law places the blame squarely on you.

5.  If you find yourself in this situation in Toronto, David Miller sends the ETF after you at 4 o’clock in the morning.

 

A few good quoted from Thomas Sowell that remind me of Barack Obama

The distinguished economist, Thomas Sowell, of the Hoover Institute, has always been one of my favourite public intellectuals. Here are a few quotes that, for some reason I can’t put my finger on, remind me of President Obama:

 The distinguished economist, Thomas Sowell, of the Hoover Institute, has always been one of my favourite public intellectuals. Here are a few quotes that, for some reason I can’t put my finger on, remind me of President Obama:

“an e-mail from a reader recalled a black classmate's comments upon graduating from high school many years ago. When asked to list the advantages and disadvantages of being black, the black student facetiously listed as an advantage ‘being praised for infinitesimal accomplishments.’

 

Many colleges claim that they develop "leaders." All too often, that means turning out graduates who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do. There are already too many people like that, and they are a menace to everyone else's freedom.

 

Some people are so busy being clever that they don't have time enough to be wise.”

 

Psst! All you liberals who happen to be reading this, in case you don’t know it, Thomas Sowell is black.

 

 

 

Thomas Sowell on how the Republicans can win the black vote

Thomas Sowell has a point. There are many issues where the Democrat agenda directly damages black Americans – their opposition to school choice (to placate teacher’s unions), their support of environmental land use restrictions (which makes urban housing unaffordable to poor blacks), and their anti—anti-crime agenda (to placate trial lawyers and the ACLU at the expense of crime victims, who are overwhelmingly black). As Sowell points out, the Republican strategy of being Democrat-lite has failed. Trying to be like the other guy, only less so, is rarely a winning strategy.

But Sowell misses the most important reason for going after the black vote: it is the best way to get the white vote. To see the truth behind this outwardly counterintuitive notion consider the fact that for a great many guilt-addled white Democrats (and liberals in general), their sense of self-worth is derived from the support they receive from the black community. If the poor, downtrodden masses choose to support the party of white liberals, then it must be because they, the white liberals, are compassionate, kind and egalitarian - and therefore good. Or so their thinking goes. But if you are able to capture, say, 20 to 30% of the black vote by demonstrating to African-Americans how other liberal interest groups cause them harm, then all that smug self-esteem will go out the window. 

In their psychic anguish, they will most resemble the central figure in the Edvard Munch painting, The Scream. Their incoherent rage will be even worse than anything Sarah Palin has inflicted on them. In other words, they will make themselves look like unhinged lunatics to anybody who doesn’t have this emotional baggage, and that would be most people.

 

Maybe Rocco Rossi is Toronto’s great right hope

At least according to this article by the Toronto Star, Rossi is saying all the right anti-Miller things. Perhaps he is the right man to be the next mayor of Toronto and clean up the mess created by David Miller. Somebody to keep an eye on anyway.

But at least, the bumbling, indecisive John Tory has left, clearing the deck for a good center-right mayoral candidate.

How President Obama will react to the Massachusetts defeat (part 2)

(For reason # 1 see yesterday’s post.)

Reason # 2: Obama cannot avoid controversial decisions like Clinton because the times are different.

Bill Clinton had the good fortune to be President when the world was taking a break from history. The economy was booming, the Soviet Union collapsed and the war that Islamic fundamentalism was waging against the west was not on our radar screen yet. Excitable types like Francis Fukayama even announced that history was over. This meant that President Clinton could get away with doing nothing for 6 years (from 1994 to 2000) and look good doing it.

It is said that it is better to be lucky than talented. Barack Obama has been very fortunate until now, but his luck has now run out, mostly because history is back. For starters, we are in a death struggle with Islamic fundamentalism. President Bush had them on the ropes but, now that the pressure has been lifted, they are regrouping and coming back – this time with nukes if Iran has its way. Additionally, America’s traditional enemies, China and Russia, cannot believe their luck. Look for opportunistic moves from them in the next 3 years.

Unemployment is over 10% and the economy is in the tank. While free economies want to fix themselves - and will do so if left alone, the US economy is not being left alone. Massive new regulation (such as Sarbanes-Oxley), a devaluing currency, the continued propping up of zombie companies like AIG and GM (that, as a result, continue to suck valuable capital out of the productive economy), and the sunsetting of the Bush tax cuts in 2010 all will retard recovery. And that is assuming that none of Obama’s big action items - Obamacare, cap and trade, financial reform or bank taxes - ever see the light of day. Any one of those will make things far worse.

And finally, there is a huge and growing federal deficit. This is a problem that cannot but grow and become more severe with time. Albert Einstein was once asked what the most powerful force in the universe is. He replied, compound interest. Just so. The light you see at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of a speeding locomotive called US public debt. To tame that will require huge, draconian cuts at the same time that pro-growth tax cuts need to be implemented. Nothing ends socialism faster than a debt crisis. But how enthusiastic will Obama be to end socialism?

How President Obama will react to the Massachusetts defeat

Jay Cost, over at Real Clear Politics, makes the conventional case that the best course of action for Barack Obama - now that Republican Scott Brown won the Massachusetts Senate race (the most liberal state in the union) - is to copy President Clinton and tack to the center: refrain from making waves with a radical leftist program so that the voters will begin to relax over time. This is no doubt Obama’s best option, but I argue he will not do it – for two reasons:

Reason #1: Barack Obama is not Bill Clinton.

While they no doubt inhabit a similar ideological space, they couldn’t be further apart on the Myers-Briggs personality scale. Obviously Clinton is gregarious, earthy, intuitive, sensual and selfish where Obama is introspective, aloof, disciplined and lofty. To summarize, Clinton is a realist, Obama is - I was about to say an idealist, but I think that doesn’t quite capture his nature. For it is possible for an idealist to be a realist. It is rare but it is not a contradiction in terms. Being a realist means only that you live in the real world and accept reality as it is; being an idealist means only that you are motivated by principles rather than personal gain. A realistic idealist is a person who lives in the real world, accepts things as they are, but is motivated to improve things within the limits of practicality. Because of this, realistic idealists make the best leaders. Ronald Reagan was one, and so were FDR, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. In Canada, our realistic idealists are Preston Manning, Mike Harris and, yes, Pierre Trudeau. 

I believe Obama is a different sub-species of idealist altogether, the utopian. The utopian’s goal is to set up heaven on earth. Since it is not possible to do this, utopians cannot be realists. This also why they are so destructive even as they preach brotherly love. Whether it is Melchior Hoffman, attempting to set up a communal theocracy in Münster with his radical Anabaptist sect in 1534, or Leon Trotsky with his locomotive of history, or Pol Pot and Year Zero in Cambodia: what these people want is the impossible, so they end up resorting to extreme measures in order to reach their goal. This is why I believe Obama is a utopian. The moment he got in the oval office with Democrat majorities in both Houses, Obama went to work like a wrecking squad on his project, paying little attention to the problems of the day (high unemployment, monetary instability and a war with Islamic fundamentalism). When he tried to justify the urgency in his health care plan by arguing that this massive new entitlement program will balance the budget, nobody believed it. Not even him. But he couldn’t openly state his real reason for the rush; that his goal is to radically remake America and that he has only 4 years to do it. That would have gone over well.

People like this are not compromisers. Sitting behind the oval office, for its own sake, bores him. Triangulating simply in order to stay in power is beneath him, and it is boring. In fact, he thinks it’s dirty and unbecoming.

But what Obama should remember is that Utopia is Greek for no place.

Stay tuned to reason #2 tomorrow.

But is Harry Reid right about America?

Senator Reid’s now infamous comments about President Obama seem to imply that only a “light skinned negro” could be elected President. He seems to imply that a more ‘authentic’ African American be unelectable in the US today. Is this true?

My answer is yes – if he is a liberal, but no, if he is conservative. The behaviour of the left and the right with regard to race is completely different these days. Mark Steyn illustrated this point perfectly in the last election with an incisive comment. He pointed out that in the Democratic primary, you have a white southern male, a woman, a Hispanic and a half-black man from Hawaii, yet for all their physical ‘diversity’ when it comes to ideology, they are all from the same cookie cutter. In contrast, even though all the Republican Presidential candidates were old white males, each nevertheless represented a distinct ideological viewpoint, some of which were at considerable variance from the party’s center of gravity, differences they (think Giuliani and McCain) did not try to conceal. In other words, when it comes to diversity, the Democrats are only interested in the ‘diversity’ of background, while Republicans will tolerate a diversity of ideas.

I think this is just as true of Conservatives and Liberals here in Canada as well. The Conservatives are now the idea party while the dominant party on the left (the Liberals) have morphed into a balkanized collection of ethnic groups - groups that seemingly care a lot about themselves and little about society at large, and who often nurse grievances with other such groups in the Liberal ‘big tent’. As a result, running a Liberal riding association in Toronto seems to require a degree in foreign affairs. Or as Mark Steyn put it,

“To those of us who find identity politics repugnant, it would seem to confirm that an unhealthy obsession with ‘anti-racism’ eventually becomes so condescending it's indistinguishable from racism — or, at any rate, the micro-classifications of apartheid — to the point where big-time Dem honchos are sitting around saying, ‘What we need here is a clean octoroon.’ ‘Well, this high yaller from Chicago might do the trick.’"

We see this dynamic at play whenever the Liberals or the NDP arbitrarily decide that X% of their candidates in the next election will be women. It’s fine for women to be candidates, but how do you enforce the rule at the riding level in order to achieve the right proportion? As Stephane Dion discovered in the Churchill River riding by-election two years ago, this is easier said than done. In practice, it means over-ruling the local riding association and parachuting in the woman the locals refused to elect in the first place. And as Stephane Dion also discovered, that don’t often work so good.

Because conservatives eschew affirmative action and actually believe Martin Luther King’s idea that you should judge a person by the content of his soul rather than the colour of his skin, we do not tie ourselves into these multicultural knots. This is why I had always assumed that the first black President would be a conservative, somebody who would – unlike Obama – be so confident of his own ‘blackness’ that he could confidently defy the black liberal establishment. Someone like, say, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Clarence Thomas or Ward Connelly.

 

What is wrong with Harry Reid’s comments

On the face of it, there is nothing wrong with Senator Reid said. First of all, what he said, that Barack Obama is a “light skinned negro” and that he has “no negro dialect, except when he wants to” is true, or rather, it is captures the larger truth that, culturally, President Obama is not a product of the African American community, both racially and culturally, and that this is his primary appeal to white liberals.

Second, these comments were made in private. There is, or there should be, a big distinction made between what is said in private and what is said in public. To me, one of the most odious aspects of left-wing ideology is the idea that the personal is political. It can be asserted that what people say in private is a better indication of what they really think than what they say in private. This is no doubt true, but it is also equally true that what people say in public correlates more with what people do in public, and what politicians do in public is the only thing that the electorate should care about. Go beyond this and we end up with thought-crime and doublethink. How many of us have views that are perfectly aligned with PC dogma? (And if actually somebody is so craven to really think like that, I don’t particularly want to meet him.)

Conservatives and Republicans have been quick to jump over this issue to score partisan points. And there is no doubt that this controversy arrives at a particularly auspicious occasion, given the battle-to-the-death currently being fought over health care. However, conservatives should be careful about what they condemn and how they condemn it. One of the worst aspects of today’s political scene is the stifling effect that political correctness has over issues that the left does not what to talk about. We should not be contributing to such restrictions, even if it benefits us at the moment. This is short-sighted tactics.

Of course, pointing out the hypocrisy of the Democrats and contrasting their defence of Harry Reid with their condemnation of Trent Lott is fair game (and good politics). Alinsky’s rule # 4 for radicals: “make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.” 

Why are there only 10,000 cab drivers in Toronto?

This is the question 680 News (Toronto’s all-news station) should have asked, instead of why there are only 74 women among Toronto’s 10,000 cabbies.

However, I am sure that this is the question that is keeping the City of Toronto’s affirmative action philosopher kings up at night (and the reason why this story appeared in the first place). Anybody with any common sense knows the answer: being a cab driver is DANGEROUS. Driving a cab is right up there with logging and coal mining (other male dominated professions) in terms of workplace fatalities. Of course, Toronto’s affirmative action gurus (who are probably mostly white) are not noted for their common sense.

This story is important because it illustrates in a nutshell what is wrong with City Hall – insulated politicians and bureaucrats concentrating on fictitious problems when real issues stare at them in the face.

In Toronto, the number of cab licenses has been fixed at 10,000 since time immemorial. Why? Who knows? But as the city grows, it is increasingly underserviced by cabs because nobody has the guts to face the special interest groups this rule creates. Because the privilege of operating a cab in a closed market is increasingly lucrative, the cost of a license has climbed into the $100,000 range. Or rather, the profession would be lucrative if the license didn’t cost four times that of an actual cab. But if the limit were removed and a free market in cabs allowed to blossom, the price of those licenses would drop to zero, but this would understandably enrage all those people who took out a second mortgage to buy a cab license.

One solution would be to buy the licenses back from the cabbies. There are two problems with this. First, it is expensive, and second, it doesn’t increase the government’s power. Hence, big government isn’t interested.

Nevertheless it would be beneficial for the city. Consider what the cabbies would do with their new found wealth. As small businessmen, they would probably plow it back into the only business they know how to do, thereby creating a flourishing and competitive marketplace for alternate transportation, and ending the need to legislate a fare structure. And if the rule limiting fares to one per cab at any given time were also lifted, we would see minivans parked outside every bar at closing time, ready to take the patrons home at closing time for $10 a head, once the van fills up. Of course, that would step on the Toronto Transit Commission’s monopoly, another special interest group that must be appeased.

But still, if people were really interested in stopping drunk driving, this would be a great way to further that goal, as we have achieved about as much as we are going to with deterrence. But instead, David Miller is vexed by metaphysical points such as how many ‘diversity czars’ can dance on the head of a pin.

Silliest. Video. Ever.

Reason Magazine, the flagship libertarian publication in the US just released this video, entitled, “Worst. Decade. Ever.” making the case that the aughts, the decade that just ended, was the worst decade ever.

Hmm. Let me see. Worse than the 1930’s with the Great Depression, the Chinese Civil War, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, the rise of Adolph Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, and capped off with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the joint Russian-German takeover of Poland? Or what about the 1940’s? That decade brought us World War II – the greatest war in history that included but was not limited to the Holocaust, and was ended with nuclear weapons and the enslavement of half of Europe by a totalitarian dictatorship; the end of the Chinese Civil War, which resulted in the rise of the bloodiest dictator in history – Mao Tse Tung; and was capped off by the beginning of the Korean War – a war bloodier than Iraq and Afghanistan combined?

OK, maybe those were worse decades. But at least the aughts were worse than the teens, the decade that bought us World War I – the second bloodiest war in history, and capped off by the Bolshevik Revolution and beginning of the bloodbath known as the Russian Civil War. Well maybe the aughts weren’t as bad as that either.

I know, I know, they covered themselves with the disclaimer that the proceeding decade was the worst since the 1990’s. But since the case can be made that the 90’s were the best decade in all of history – if one considers the general prosperity; the end of the cold war, which the most liberating moment in all history; and the general peace that reigned throughout (except for a few notable pockets) - then this video, coupled with the disclaimer, is a remarkably weak condemnation of the last ten years. One gets the feeling that this disclaimer was thrown in at the last minute when somebody reminded the powers-that-be over at Reason about the Great Depression and World War II just in time to stop the upload button from being clicked.

Jees. What a bunch of whining! Looking back at what our forefathers went through, we’ve had it real easy in the past ten years.