Lorne Gunter, National Post
Published: Monday, December 29, 2008
Suppose you lived in the Toronto suburb of Don Mills and people from the suburb of Scarborough — about 10 kilometres away — were firing as many as 100 rockets a day into your yard, your kids’ school, the strip mall down the street and your dentist’s office.
A trip to the cleaners to pick up your shirts would be a life-risking act. Going to the grocery store would involve thinking through in your mind the location of all the shelter sites along the way, in case rockets started raining down on the road as you drove by. Continue Reading »
By Jonathan Kay: Published in The National Post, December 30, 2008.
In December’s final days, the self-reflective question I ask is this: Laid end to end, would my weekly offerings provide an intelligent synopsis of the year that was?
As in most years, my travails disappoint. Too often, I directed my aim at tiny, annoying targets of opportunity that happened to scurry across my journalistic field of vision — Heather Mallick, anti-Israeli public-service unions, radical student groups — while ignoring the big-game trends rising up against the horizon. Continue Reading »
“Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. Man has no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons, and to make weapons – a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute – the function of a reasoning mind. Continue Reading »
By Richard G. Scott, December 20, 2008
The answer is yes. Recessions are unpleasant experiences for many businesses and the people who work for them, not to mention of course the people who ultimately lose their jobs during recessions.
So then if recessions are bad, then we should just ban them, right? Why would we want to keep having these pesky occurrences every few years if it makes so many of us downright miserable? Surely we can elect people to make sure that we are protected from recessions, with their powerful big government sugar daddy programs and bailouts. Yes, that’s the role of government, to make sure that none of us experience personal hardship as a result of the business cycle. Continue Reading »
Fraudulent “Credit Crisis” Paves Way for Economic Disaster
By Cliff Kincaid Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Doing the kind of investigative reporting we should expect from the major media, a financial research and consulting firm has released a major analysis of the “credit crisis” that concludes that the claims made by Treasury Department Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke to justify a socialist takeover of the financial industry were demonstrably false.
The analysis, Flawed Assumptions about the Credit Crisis: A Critical Examination of US Policymakers, concludes that the result of the unjustified massive federal intervention in the economy could be similar to the economic crisis in the Weimar Republic of 1922, where disastrous hyperinflation made the currency worthless and threatened the nation’s political system and stability. Continue Reading »
By EPW Blog Thursday, December 11, 2008
Study: Sea Levels Fail to Rise – Warming Fears in ‘Dustbin of History’
POZNAN, Poland – The UN global warming conference currently underway in Poland is about to face a serious challenge from over 650 dissenting scientists from around the globe who are criticizing the climate claims made by the UN IPCC and former Vice President Al Gore. Set for release this week, a newly updated U.S. Senate Minority Report features the dissenting voices of over 650 international scientists, many current and former UN IPCC scientists, who have now turned against the UN. The report has added about 250 scientists (and growing) in 2008 to the over 400 scientists who spoke out in 2007. The over 650 dissenting scientists are more than 12 times the number of UN scientists (52) who authored the media hyped IPCC 2007 Summary for Policymakers. Continue Reading »
By John Thompson
There are a lot of people who seem cheered by the weakened status of the United States at the moment. They are fools and one can only hope that if their wishes come to pass, they become the first victims of the world that emerges when the Pax Americana ends. Alas, the universe simply isn’t that fair.
Peace is something whose existence we can construe from the occasional absence of war. In European history, between the creation of the modern nation state with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 (which ended the ghastly Thirty Years War) and the final downfall of Napoleon after the battle of Waterloo in 1815, there was scarcely a year without a war going on somewhere on the continent. Continue Reading »
As we approach the end of a year filled with considerable financial, economic and social turmoil, Canada probably more than most countries may be on the edge of something ominous and transforming. Our country has been predisposed to interventionism from a leftist element for many years. I fear that the “perfect storm” of global circumstances may have now conspired to push Canada into an economic maelstrom from which it will be extremely difficult to emerge, unless our Government stands strong.
I say this not because Canada’s economy is in particularly poor condition. On the contrary, Canada leads the G8 in GDP growth, and is forecast to lead western economies out of recession by 2010. We are not as yet in a recession in the strict definition. The threat is not of an economic nature, but of a political agenda which would push our relatively small country (3% of world GDP) into a lengthy downturn. Continue Reading »
JEFFREY SIMPSON
From Saturday’s Globe and Mail
E-mail Jeffrey Simpson | Read Bio | Latest Columns
December 5, 2008 at 8:00 PM EST
Now that a sudden and violent storm has passed through Canadian politics, people of all persuasions are trying to sort out what precisely happened, why the convulsion came, what damage was done and what lies ahead.
A Conservative government exists. It had won one confidence vote, but could not win another, and so used prorogation to flee Parliament. The Conservatives appear to have the upper hand in public opinion outside Quebec, but have lost ground in that province.
A Liberal opposition exists. It nominally leads a government-in-waiting coalition with the NDP, supported by the Bloc Québécois. But the Liberals, saddled with a politically inept leader, walked into a trap of their own making from which they do not know how to escape.
The political storm reflected badly on Prime Minister Stephen Harper, whose decisions ignited it, but even worse on Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion, whose impetuous reaction led the party astray. Continue Reading »
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose
you were a member of Congress. But then
I repeat myself. – Mark Twain
………………………………………..
I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into
prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and
trying to lift himself up by the handle.
- Winston Churchill
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A government which robs Peter to pay Paul
can always depend on the support of Paul.
- George Bernard Shaw Continue Reading »
