Canadian Cincinnatus

Apparently Bob Dylan doesn’t like Obama either

According to President Obama’s Rolling Stone magazine interview (the fallout of which is summarized in this Daily Caller article), Bob Dylan was aloof at a White House concert he put on for Obama. In the President’s own words:

“[Bob Dylan] wouldn’t come to the rehearsal; usually, all these guys are practicing before the set in the evening. He didn’t want to take a picture with me; usually all the talent is dying to take a picture with me and Michelle before the show, but he didn’t show up to that. He came in and played “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” A beautiful rendition. The guy is so steeped in this stuff that he can just come up with some new arrangement, and the song sounds completely different. Finishes the song, steps off the stage — I’m sitting right in the front row — comes up, shakes my hand, sort of tips his head, gives me just a little grin, and then leaves. And that was it — then he left. That was our only interaction with him.”

To me this comment is a very revealing window on the state of his mind – Obama’s that is, not Dylan’s. Apparently, one reason Obama wanted to be President was that he could invite famous musicians to perform at the White House for him and then swoon over him. And when Dylan refused to follow the program, well that just isn’t done. What a shallow egomaniac the President is! Instead of wallowing in celebrity adulation so much, why doesn’t the President spend more of his finite time thinking about the economy? As blogger Rand Simberg once put it (sorry I couldn’t find the exact post), Obama is an arrogant man with much to be modest about.

Now is Dylan a crypto-conservative as some of the Dylanologists quoted in the rest of the Daily Caller article argue? Well, certainly somebody who got baptized in Pat Boone’s swimming pool and who wrote the lyrics to the song, Gotta Serve Somebody, is hardly a doctrinaire left-wing hipster. I think the answer is that he is simply his own man - somebody who isn’t under the sway of any ideology.

But it does kind of put into new light why his fans reacted with such vehemence in 1965 when he ‘went electric’. I could never understand until recently why they reacted so strongly to Dylan for what is simply a style change. It was only when I recently read that folk music had been, since its inception, a left-wing project sponsored by the Communist Party of America that I understood the source of their anger. The folkies were pissed because they thought they detected heresy. And maybe they did! By going electric, Dylan signaled that he wasn’t going to be another doctrinaire left-wing mediocrity like Woody Guthrie - Dylan’s early hero. Woody Guthrie’s ideology (and therefore his music) was preserved in ideological amber, but Dylan kept growing and maturing. Which is why so many of Dylan’s songs are listenable today while so many of Guthrie’s songs just sound silly.

 

Airport Security in North America is completely on the wrong track

After the “don’t touch my junk” controversy, the TSA and its defenders are presenting the issue of nude x-ray scans and enhanced pat-downs as a tradeoff between security and convenience, with the TSA siding with security.

This is a false set of choices, as the example of David Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv demonstrates. Being the principal airport in Israel, Tel Aviv airport is a prime target for Islamic terrorists and yet, it is also one of the safest and most convenient airports to use – with a typical traveler taking only 20 to 30 minutes to go from the highway to the gate. How did Israel achieve this success? They did it by not treating everybody the same. Whereas North American airport security concentrates on things (i.e. shoes, toenail clippers and toothpaste), Israeli security concentrates on people. They do their utmost to identify the 0.01% of the passengers who pose a security risk and focus their attention on them. They are more interested in asking travelers pointed questions - while looking straight into their eyes - than a TSA official, who is more interested in getting the Swedish grandmother to take off her belt. To aid in identifying bad people, Israeli airport security is plugged straight into military intelligence. Our airport security works as if it were stuck on a desert island.

The reason for the disparity in methods is, I believe, political correctness. The problem with the Israeli method is that profiling - ethnic and otherwise – inherently forms a central core technique. To our political correctness nabobs, this is a no-no. They would rather sacrifice safety - as well as the dignity of our citizens - than break this taboo.

Speaking of the dignity of our citizens, I think Mark Steyn is right to point out that assaulting the dignity of our citizenry is not a trivial side issue; it is the central issue. Ordering people around like sheep and subjecting them to indignities is enervating and, in the long term, corrodes the self-reliant virtues required by a free people to remain free. The first instinct of a free man is to deal with his own problems himself. It is not a coincidence that the one bright spot on 9/11 was the “let’s roll” ethos that governed the passengers on United 93. As Steyn pointed out, on the day when all the fancy pants, three-letter acronym, cost-is-no-object federal agencies abjectly failed, it was a spontaneously formed militia on United 93 that helped save part of the day. All our airport screening does is to empower bureaucrats and teach the average person to think that airport security is somebody else’s problem.

The result of this mindset is the ban on all sharp objects from planes because, after all, the 9/11 hijackers used them to take planes over. And yet, once the passengers on United 93 realized that the hijackers were on a suicide mission, they fought back. All we do when we ban sharp objects is prevent people from having the tools they need to fight back and win. If everybody on a plane has a sharp knife and is aware that hijackers might be on a suicide mission, then hijacking that plane becomes impossible. We make every traveler in the world take off their shoes because one guy tried unsuccessfully to blow up a plane with explosives in his shoes. And yet, why did the shoe bomber fail? Because his fellow passengers spontaneously formed a militia and stopped him. Too bad they weren’t allowed to have boxcutters on them; their job would have been easier.

But when you get right down to it, the government doesn’t like people overpowering terrorists. It infringes on their jobs. They don’t like it any more than the Toronto Police liked it when David Chan decided to protect his own property.

When it comes to airport security, freedom isn’t the problem. Political correctness (the doctrine of our elites) and government monopoly on the use of force are the problem. Freedom is the solution.

Why hydro rates in Ontario are about to skyrocket

Ontario Premier McGuinty thought he was going to have a good news day when his government announced a 10% cut in electricity rates for Jan 1, 2011. This all blew up in his face when it was revealed that Ontario power consumers will face a 45% rate increase in the next 5 years which will more than offset this government subsidized treat (i.e. taxpayers rewarding themselves with their own money). 

This is common knowledge. What we need to keep our eye focused on is why electricity rates in Ontario are climbing. The basic problem is that Ontario no longer builds power plants, while it is hell-bent on shutting down existing plants. No nuclear plants are in the works; the gas-fired plant scheduled for Oakville is shelved while the Lakeview Thermoelectric Station was shut down because it burned coal. Talk of shutting down the coal fired plants at Lambton and even Nanticoke persists. Meanwhile local utilities are offering exorbitant subsidies to proprietors of wind farms and solar arrays. This counterproductive behaviour isn’t just a silly Liberal idea. Red Tories Ernie Eves and John Tory also promised to shut down our coal plants, just not as many and not as fast as the Liberals (the “me-too-but…” strategy).

As long as Ontario’s electricity policy is governed by a stuff white people like ethos rather than a realistic appraisal of real-world factors, our electricity rates will continue to rise. The facts of the matter are: coal is the cheapest source of reliable power; nuclear is the cleanest source of reliable power; natural gas is cleaner than coal and cheaper than nuclear; solar and wind are too unreliable to ever form more than a small subset of Ontario’s power; and the examples from various European countries show that green energy is a money losing dog. These are fundamental truths that the arts-and-croissant crowd in downtown Toronto doesn’t like to think about because it is too messy. Nevertheless we have no option but to ponder such concerns if we want to keep enjoying reliable cheap electricity in Ontario.

The environmentalists would doubtlessly point out pollution problems and global warming concerns. But even if we assume that global warming is a real crisis, then why are they against nuclear power? the one proven generation technology that doesn’t contribute to greenhouse gases at all. Just look at the French power grid. It doesn’t emit any pollution.

Hopefully the leader of the Ontario Conservative Party, Tim Hudak, shows more understanding of this issue than his two hapless predecessors.

 

I had long suspected that Hollywood director Martin Scorsese was a closet conservative, now I am sure

Have you seen Scorsese’s last film, Shutter Island?

Very interesting movie.

The film is about a US Federal Marshall played by Leonardo DiCaprio who investigates the disappearance of an inmate on a maximum-security mental hospital for the criminally insane, located on an inaccessible island off the coast of Massachusetts. About three quarters of the way though it, DiCaprio’s character comes to believe that he has uncovered a plot by the CIA to conduct medical experiments, they learned about from the Nazi’s after World War II, to produce zombies “who are capable of anything” to be used for fighting the Cold War. DiCaprio believes that the omnipresent conspiracy in charge of this farfetched scheme basically controls the entire US government and is presumably backed by the military-industrial complex. At this point I rolled my eyes. I was a hair’s breadth away of turning the DVD player off but for some reason I didn’t. I was glad I didn’t because by the time the film ended, the whole story had been inverted in such a way that DiCaprio’s beliefs were shown to be dilusional and irrational.

I had always felt that one of the best ways to make a conservative film is to seemingly employ the left-wing tropes and plot twists standard in Hollywood films, making the audience think they know what is going to happen next. After you have sucked them in, you invert the plot against the left-wing themes. By inverting the plot, you subvert the usual Message.

This is exactly what Scorsese did.

And in doing so, he made the film a treatise on madness and a study on the insanity of conspiracy theories – in particular, a study of the insanity of left-wing conspiracy theories.

Conservative media gadfly Andrew Breitbart remarked that a few years ago that when he researched the left-wing bias in Hollywood he was surprised by how many closet conservatives he found there – people who think like you or me but are afraid to say so because of the negative impact this might have on their careers. He claimed that some fairly well known names are actually conservative.

Evidence like this convinces me more and more that mainstream US culture is on the verge of a tipping point, where the “counter-culture” and the mainstream culture trade places – kind of like a mirror image of what happened in the sixties. And judging by the hysterical way the left reacts to, well, pretty much everything, they believe this as well, at least at some level.

How to repeal Obamacare

Instapundit reader John Miller has an excellent suggestion about how to dismantle Obamacare: 

Yes, you make the Senate vote on ObamaCare again.

You make them vote on a lot of things.

Were I in Boehner’s shoes, I’d be preparing a long list of very short, very simple bills, each covering a single issue with broad public support.

Race-neutral enforcement of civil-rights laws.

Sanctioning ’sanctuary cities’. 

Voter ID.

Forcing the DOJ to implement the voter-roll cleanup provisions of HAVA.

And so on. Single-issue bills that can be read by any voter in five minutes.

Run them through the House and, should a few more of these Senators staring 2012 in the face decide they don’t dare oppose the bills, we get to see Obama double-talk his way through vetoing motherhood and apple pie.

This is similar to what I have been saying for a while, that the most obvious way to dismantle an existing law - to write an anti-bill that cancels it out exactly – is likely the most difficult way to get rid of it.

The reason why is because every law is written to have some political appeal. Even a 2,700 page monstrosity like Obamacare has popular aspects – probably quite a few, judging from its length. So when you propose an anti-bill, you fight on ground of the enemy’s choosing - always a bad idea. But if you write a completely new law that addresses the things people don’t like about the act you want to get rid of, the other side must fight on grounds of your choosing.

For example, one piece of really bad legislation is the Americans With Disability Act that was enacted under the George H. W. Bush’s administration. Among its ill effects is that employees can sue their employer for wrongful dismissal if they can prove that their alcoholism, drug addiction or other antisocial attribute (that makes them completely unsuitable as an employee) is a disability, because under the Americans With Disability Act, the employer must accommodate your disability. Well imagine repealing something called the Americans With Disability Act! Can’t be done. But if you write a law that specifically targets its bad effects then the political playing field all of a sudden changes. It is now the Americans With Disability Act’s supporters who have to explain why trucking companies should be forced to keep alcoholic drivers on their payroll.

So if the Republicans try to pass the anti-Obamacare act, Obama can demagogue the fact that the GOP is taking health care away from 30 million people – how heartless and cruel of them! 

Instead, they should write simple, clear bills that attack Obamacare’s unpopular core principles directly. Take, for instance, a ½ page bill that bans the government from restricting what kind of health care individuals can purchase (going so far as to allow them not to purchase any). Very simple law with no complicating side issues that Obama can latch onto to muddy the waters. He is either for individual choice or he’s against it. He must choose. The optics are all on the side of the free market and against Obama. While the President might choose to swallow a few such poison pills, I bet he will end up having to let some of this stuff through.

Keep sending him these kind of laws. By 2012, the GOP will look effective and Obama will look evil.

 

The reason why Rob Ford won in Toronto and John Tory lost

The results of Monday’s municipal election in Toronto validated a theory I have been evangelizing for some time in this space. My hypothesis is that the conventional wisdom, that moderate conservatism appeals to ‘moderate’ voters more than principled conservatism, is wrong. In fact, I assert, principled conservatism has the greater track record of success among centrist voters and the uncommitted.

The Red Tory line is that if the left puts forward a set of policies x and the right puts forward a set of policies y, then the voter in the ‘middle’ will favour something midway between x and y. Therefore, to get their vote, some of your more ‘extreme’ policies have to be jettisoned. 

I contend that us political junkies (both on the left and the right) completely misunderstand the motivations of the uncommitted voter. We project out interests onto them and assume that because we are interested in public policy, then they must be as well. In reality, the centrist voter doesn’t care a whit about policies at all. He finds political policy boring and bases his decision on other factors entirely. To call him a ‘moderate’ is to completely mischaracterize him, which is why I have put the word ‘moderate’ in scare quotes as many times as I can. 

Typically, the ‘moderate’ votes for the candidate who he thinks is the best leader, irrespective of policies, which he assumes are lies anyway. What is a good leader? The leader must be decisive, resolute, fearless and calm – in short, an alpha male. Why does the ‘moderate’ favour alpha males? It is natural for humans to follow the alpha male because back on the good ‘ol hunter-gatherer days your chances of survival varied directly with how good your leader was. You don’t follow a beta male wuss, even if he is a nice guy, because he will get you killed. On the other had, you have a fighting chance if an alpha male a-hole leads your pack. Us policy wonks forget how natural this way of thinking is because we are surrounded by other weirdoes who are as obsessed with the minutiae of public policy as we are.

How do the ‘moderates’ assess leadership ability? A great resume – being a former CEO, governor or military leader helps. The trouble is however, unless this service was publicly demonstrated (i.e. Steve Jobs, Rudy Giuliani, Dwight Eisenhower), it’s all abstract. What is more real and vivid? How the candidate handles himself in the campaign: Does he allow himself to be taken off message? Does he cope well with scandals? Does he apologize when he doesn’t have to? Does he get flustered by distractions? Does he make excuses and whine when things go wrong? Or is he calm and cool during the debate? Does he have a clear message? Does he inspire?

The answers to these questions tells us why Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Pierre Trudeau, Jean Chrétien, Mike Harris and Rob Ford got the uncommitted vote even though they were more extreme than the people who elected them. This is also why John Turner, Paul Martin, Ernie Eves and John Tory failed even though they were arguably closer to the voters policy-wise.

The people want to follow a leader. They want to be convinced. They don’t want the leader to come to them. A leader who comes to them isn’t a real leader and will be despised. This is an important point. Non-leaders will not simply be poorly regarded; they will be actively hated - even if they are nice guys. In contrast, a real leader will be always be highly regarded even if he is a bastard.

Rob Ford impressed the non-political voter in Toronto because he had a strong, clear message and stuck to it no matter what the Toronto Star threw at him. Conversely, moderate John Tory was completely shut out of Toronto in the last provincial election because his mishandling of the faith-based school funding issue proved he didn’t have the right stuff. The fact that the funding of faith-based schools was a comparatively unimportant issue was beside the point. By the time Tory dumped that policy, the voter’s real concern was Tory’s leadership skills. When he changed his mind, he merely confirmed their negative impression of him. The great counterintuitive truth is that the uncommitted voter cares less about what you believe in than in how you champion it. 

Incidentally, this was the secret behind David Miller’s first mayoral campaign in Toronto. His vigorous and resolute championship of the island bridge issue – an issue that affected only a small percentage of Torontonians – impressed the voters.

This is why the Red Tory strategy of moving to the middle is usually such a disaster. The endless compromising alienates the core-issue voters and the lack of resolution proves to the independents that the Red Tory has no balls. The Red Tory loses both ways.