Hillier's War

Before it was Harpers War, Afghanistan was Hillier's War. And as such it was one that was created by him to change Canada's Armed Forces from Peace keepers to warriors. And as we know warriors take no prisoners.

Harper stands by Hillier

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is staunchly defending his Defence Chief amid claims the General did not consult with Foreign Affairs before signing a detainee transfer agreement in 2005 that left no provision to verify prisoner safety.

Hillier pushed flawed detainee plan

The Department of Foreign Affairs was pushed to the sidelines when Canada struck its detainee-transfer deal in Afghanistan, two senior government sources have told The Globe and Mail.

“We were not consulted,” said one, adding that Foreign Affairs was shunted aside by the Department of National Defence and Canada's top soldier, Rick Hillier, when he signed the accord in 2005. The deal has become mired in controversy because it includes no follow-up role for Canada on the fate of detainees in Afghanistan's notoriously brutal prison system.

Another senior foreign-service officer gave a longer explanation: “Hillier went to Kabul thinking of them [the detainees] as ‘scumbags' and made the deal. Hillier wanted to sign it; he insisted on signing it,” he said. “Defence took the file and messed it up.”

The comment played off a remark General Hillier, Chief of the Defence Staff, made in July, 2005, when he set off a national debate by referring to the Taliban as “detestable murderers and scumbags.”

See:

Afghanistan

Heil Hillier, Maintiens le droit

Joined At The Hip

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Anti-Smoking Hypocrites

An excellent summation of the philosophical and political morality of anti-smoking legislators;

Going into a privately-owned restaurant where smokers voluntarily associate and then complaining about the smoke makes as much sense as going to a rock concert and then complaining that they won’t turn off the loud music.

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RCYA

Further proof that RCMP Commissioner 'Cover Yer Ass' Zaccardelli was an incompetent administrator who has a penchant for perjury.....as if we needed anymore proof....

Former RCMP commission Giuliano Zaccardelli told the Commons justice committee in 2004 that the forensic lab services matched the best in the world, that it had no backlog and that all cases involving violent crimes were given priority and that its clients — police forces and prosecutors were satisfied.

"Our audit found many of these claims to be incorrect," Fraser stated, adding that the most of the same problems found in the audit were raised in 1990 and 2000. "It is disappointing to find them still unresolved," she told reporters.

The auditor general said the fact is that for 99 per cent of its cases it is unable to meet its own turnaround target of 30 days, partly due to its backlog of DNA requests, which on average take 114 days to complete in 2005-06. However, when pressed, it can turn around urgent service request in 15 days, but this only happens in about one per cent of the cases.

Former RCMP Commissioner Guiliano Zaccardelli told a Parliamentary committee in 2004 that there was no backlog at his force's forensic services and that DNA analysis for major cases was completed within 15 days.

But a report released yesterday by Auditor-General Sheila Fraser says there is a backlog, it is growing, and fewer than one per cent of DNA samples sent to the RCMP Forensic Laboratory Services are processed in less than two weeks.

The rest, including homicides and sexual assaults languished in the lab for an average of 114 days in 2005-06, Ms. Fraser said in her report released Tuesday.

That was actually an increase of nearly three weeks over 2003-04 when additional spending and staff were directed at the labs because the force was being criticized for long turnover times and backlogs.

Ms. Fraser refused to speculate on the reasons for Mr. Zaccadelli's misleading testimony when she spoke to reporters at a news conference yesterday.

“I think you have to ask the people who made those statements. I have no explanation for that,” she said.

The suggestion that the former commissioner may have misled politicians comes after he resigned for providing false information to the government about Maher Arar who was wrongly accused of having terrorist ties. It also comes as Parliament is trying to get to the bottom of mishandling of the RCMP pension.

See:

Keystone Kops and Air India

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Buzz the Protectionist

First he sucked up to the Liberals now he is sucking up to the Conservatives. Despite his 'I am more socialist than you' rants, Buzz Hargrove is simply a good old fashioned protectionist. But now the Tories like his protectionism, whereas they opposed him over Free Trade, and will again as they try an pass a bilateral free trade deal with Korea which he opposes. Strange bedfellows indeed.

Buzz Hargrove agreeing with the Conservatives and the Conservatives agreeing with Buzz Hargrove?

Maybe there is something funny with the environment after all.

But Buzz and the Tories think the only thing that's funny is with the crazy so-called environmentalists' ravenous quest for pushing Global Warming Doom -- all at the cost of the Canadian economy.

"Everybody is chasing this new idol called the environment without any thought of how we got here," the CAW president said yesterday. "I am not buying the argument myself."

But he does believe tens of thousands of jobs will be lost if the movement continues at this pace. "I think people have to recognize this problem is serious," he said.

And it's not global warming he's referring to. It's a Canada and Ontario without an auto industry he's worried about. If Al Gore and David Suzuki get their way, Buzz said, this very well could be the result. "The rhetoric is worrisome," he said. "We have got everything working against us right now."

Unrealistic environmental goals, unfair trade deals and out of control inflation don't add up to good times for automakers --not to mention related industries.

But the Tories, said Buzz, get that. And their plan is a proper response.

"It's realistic. They understand it is going to have to be a long-term solution that will take some time," he said.

He thought Al Gore's comments that the plan the Tories introduced was a "fraud" was out of line.

"I think John Baird is right on the money," said Hargrove. "Al Gore was vice-president for eight years and in the senate before that where they voted against (environmental reforms). So I don't know where he gets his credentials to come in here and lecture."

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Year of the Pig and the Liberal Green Alliance

Remember this is the year of the Red/Golden pig in Taoist astrology.

The last time the Liberals did something stupid was in the year of the monkey and that ended up with a minority government under Paul Martin.

This year we have the marriage of the Liberals and Greens under Dion and May. As Hexagram 31 of the I Ching says for the year of the pig; Some that marry young women get fortunes through it.

Of course this does not say 'good' fortune, just fortunes. And some fortunes can be bad.

The Liberals may have bought a pig in a poke with their alliance with the Greens.


See:

Prince Charles Agrees With Elizabeth May

Green Nazi's


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Whine Me A River

The loonie's impact is hardest on manufacturers in Central Canada as its impact on western manufactures is being offset by the high demand for their products, Myers said.

There's not much the Bank of Canada can do to help firms deal with the strong dollar, Myers said. However, governments can continue to cut taxes on investments in new machinery and equipment and reduce their regulatory compliance costs, he said.

"The high dollar has forced manufacturers to become super-efficient, but they still face a lot of mandatory overhead costs," he said.

If they are so efficient then they should be able to plow their record profits back into their companies, instead of investing them in the stock market or sending them offshore to tax havens. Of course "super-efficient" is just another way of saying job cuts.

See:

Productivity Myth

Canadian Workers Poorer Today Than Yesterday

Variable Capital


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A.J. Toynbee

One of my favorite historians who was influenced by Spengler and Ibn Khaldun. His critique of WWI blaming the harsh politics of repatriations on the rise of Nazism remains controversial.

A.J. Toynbee
Toynbee's approach may be compared to the one used by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West. He rejected, however, Spengler's deterministic view that civilizations rise and fall according to a natural and inevitable cycle.He expressed great admiration for Ibn Khaldun and in particular the Muqaddimah, the preface to Khaldun's own universal history, which notes many systemic biases that intrude on historical analysis via the evidence.

Toynbee's ideas have not proved overly influential on other historians. Comparative history, to which his approach belongs, has been in the doldrums, partly as an adverse reaction to Toynbee. The Canadian economic historian Harold Adams Innis is a notable exception. Following Toynbee and others (Spengler, Kroeber, Sorokin, Cochrane), Innis examined the flourishing of civilizations in terms of administration of empires and media of communication.

Toynbee, Arnold Joseph, 1889-1975

• The Balkans
  A History of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey (English)
• Turkey: a Past and a Future (English)

Arnold Toynbee: Pro-Arab or Pro-Zionist?
Israel Studies - Volume 4, Number 1, Spring 1999, pp. 73-95
Indiana University Press Israel Studies 4.1 _________________________________________________________________ Arnold Toynbee: Pro Arab or Pro-Zionist? Isaiah Friedman * Zionist Dialectics _________________________________________________________________ In the late forties, Toynbee acquired the reputation of being a passionate Arab protagonist and a fierce opponent of the State of Israel; by his own admission he became known as a "Western spokesman for the Arab cause." But during World War I and its aftermath, he was less than sympathetic toward the Arabs. He was greatly disturbed to note that the Syrians, contrary to assurances made by Hussein, as well as by al-Faruqi, remained loyal to Turkey and "their conscripts fought dutifully on her side . . . their leaders are too prudent and the people too peaceable to allow them for a moment to contemplate rising in arms." Early in the War, he ascertained that, in the Turkish Asiatic provinces, there was only "a veritable cockpit of nationalities so mutilated that they have never even achieved that [kind of] unity which is the essential preliminary to a national life." By 1917, when the general Arab uprising had failed to materialize, he concluded that they had no "national consciousness. There are Arabs in name who have nothing Arabic about them but their language--most of the peasants in Syria are such . . ." This view was not unique. The official Handbook prepared in 1918 to guide the British delegates to the Peace Conference gave the following description: The people west of the Jordan are not Arabs, but only Arab-speaking. The bulk of the population are fellahin; that is to say, agricultural workers owning land as a village community or working land for the Syrian effendi.

But, it must be born in mind that liberal democracy and socialism-communism, irrespective of their differences, are not absolute opposites. They are branches of the same spiritual tree. This was, for example, claimed by Spengler and Karl Popper, the two otherwise so different thinkers. Not only that A.J. Toynbee, on his part, shared this opinion, but even he saw in the Russian communism the means of westernization of those parts of the world which are hardly accessible to the western civilization in its original form. The true negation of both liberal democracy and communism is Islamic fundamentalism, which is also an imperialism of high style. It personifies a militant, expansionistic nature of the prophet Muhammad's religion. Therefore, the names "Islamic fundamentalism", "Islamic imperialism" or even "Islam in its authentic form" are equally justified.

According to British historian Arnold Toynbee the decline and fall of
great empires was caused by routine and the lack of creativity among social
elites. On the one hand, those societies lacked a shared vision of the future
– on the other they failed to hammer out generally acceptable values that
could contribute to social stability and lend to a shared identity. Growing
internal divisions led to the demise of authorities and the erosion of the
elites’ control, whereas institutions complied less and less to the needs of
the real social and economic situation. Institutional inertia and the
inability to make strategic choices intensified the systemic incoherencies
that manifested themselves in escalating conflicts of interest, the
particularism of various groups, and the loss of steerability over the system
as a whole.

See:

Ibn Khaldun 14th Century Arab Libertarian

Oriental Origins of Post-modernism

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Religion and the Market

Protestantism is Capitalism

An Economic Analysis of the Protestant Reformation

"This paper seeks to explain the initial successes and failures of Protestantism on economic grounds. It argues that the medieval Roman Catholic Church, through doctrinal manipulation, the exclusion of rivals, and various forms of price discrimination, ultimately placed members seeking the Z good "spiritual services" on the margin of defection. These monopolistic practices encouraged entry by rival firms, some of which were aligned with civil governments. The paper hypothesizes that Protestant entry was facilitated in emergent entrepreneurial societies characterized by the decline of feudalism and relatively unstable distribution of wealth and repressed in more homogeneous, rent-seeking societies that were mostly dissipating rather than creating wealth. In these societies the Roman Church was more able to continue the practice of price discrimination. Informal tests of this proposition are conducted by considering primogeniture and urban growth as proxies for wealth stability."

Protestants explain their religion of capitalism as neo-platonism. The marketplace of vice and virtue, and God gives you free choice. Which is why the Calgary School and the Harpocrites embrace neo-platonism.

Social conservatives want morality to dominate the market while promoting the idea of free choice. Their free choice of course is not for the social good but for oneself, their morality some idealized version of the 1950's as we can see in the debate over child care.

On balance, I conclude that the market economy allows more people more of the time to achieve more of the goals they set for themselves. I think this is not only arguable from economic theory but seems to me to leap from the pages of history. Conversely, I have learnt that, beyond its essential function as policeman, judge and welfare-provider-of-last-resort, the state is a very ineffective means of enabling people to achieve their ends. It lacks the flexibility and tacit knowledge that is needed to coordinate the revolving kaleidoscope of people's valuations, plans and choices. It has great difficulty in replacing profit with another barometer for measuring the quality of its services. A large state attracts undesirables who use its apparatus as an instrument to exploit others for their own selfish ends.

But it is nonetheless true that market capitalism permits the greedy person, the hedonist and other moral reprobates, at least within the basic rules of property and life, to pursue their chosen ends of self-gratification. In a free society, the possibility of making immoral choices is a real possibility. The sun of liberty rises on the evil and the good, as the rain of misfortune falls on the righteous and the unrighteous.

Yet the liberty to make immoral choices allowed by the free society should not lead us to conclude that immorality is the norm in free societies. To draw this conclusion is to commit a logical fallacy. The liberty to commit immoral acts is at the same time a liberty to perform virtuous deeds. So, in a society where people are free to choose their lifestyles, the heedless acquisition or conspicuous consumption of material wealth, or the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, need not be preferred choices. I can choose to live for myself or for a higher principle―to pursue extrinsic or intrinsic goals. Even if I choose to make money, it may be for my own pleasure or I could emulate Andrew Carnegie and earn it for the benefit of others.

So a community of monks or nuns, having embraced voluntary poverty and individual ownership, is just as authentically part of the market economy as is the board of directors of a multinational company. Both ways of living are marked by their respect for the lives, rights and property of others, and are thus distinguished from the lifestyle of the swindling business executive, the petty thief, the mafia boss and the hired killer. We can conclude that, if everyone in our free society renounced the possession of anything beyond the mere essentials, or adopted the technology-free lifestyle of the Amish, our society would nevertheless be just as authentic an example of market capitalism as would a community populated with clones of Gordon Gekko.

Understood in this way, market capitalism cannot be equated-as it so often is-with materialism. Materialism is the genuine foe of Christian morality, rather than market capitalism, which can be both friendly and inimical to Christian morality depending upon the choices people make. As I have already mentioned, the very freedom of the market facilitates all sorts of responsible, even self-denying behaviour, which must be set alongside the irresponsible and selfish actions chosen by others. Some observers discern a greater preponderance of materialist attitudes among the less affluent, non-capitalist societies―their more affluent, capitalist cousins having discovered that, 'All that glitters is not gold' and having the time and resources at hand to pursue non-material ends in life.

But, while market capitalism may provide for and even encourage virtue, it cannot guarantee virtuous behaviour. There is another side to the symbiotic relationship between freedom and virtue. The free society confines its legislation to the enforcement of justice. But in order to survive, the free society requires a critical mass of the community to value virtue and to behave virtuously. There must be more than a minimalist adherence to virtue.

We can begin to reflect on the necessity of virtue for freedom by looking more closely at choices-not from an economic, but from an ethical point of view. Our choices have consequences, not just for our material but also for our moral well-being. Our choices live on in us to shape our characters. Good choices make us virtuous while bad choices make us vicious. In other words, as we continue down a path of good or bad actions, we inevitably become different people, for better or for worse.

The latest endeavour of Christianity. God is your financial counselor.

See

Prince of Peace?

Pauline Origins of Social Conservatism

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CRTC vs The Public Interest

The CRTC was created to protect the interests of citizens today it protects the interests of telcos and communications media oligopolies in Canada.

The former monopolies can now vary rates among customers depending on where they live, and other factors. The companies had asked for permission to vary rates, in order to help them compete with cable rivals such as Rogers Communications Inc., that face no restrictions when they offer local service.

Companies such as Rogers will have about 18 per cent of Canadian telephone customers by the end of the year, according to a report by Convergence Consulting Group Ltd. that was released this month.

Stuart Langford, the sole CRTC commissioner to dissent, said the ruling removes any consumer protection except for clients who subscribe to the most basic service. "Incumbent phone companies can charge whatever they like; the sky's the limit," he wrote. "Consumers are left with two choices: pay or do without."

Monday's ruling will remove any incentive for new entrants to compete with the former monopolies, now that the CRTC "has given incumbent phone companies so much power to crush competition before it even gets started," Langford said.

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Spot The Contradiction

France opposes Turkey joining the EU because it is a Muslim country. But Turkey banned the Islamic headscarf for women before France did....And France declares it is doing this to remain secular, which Turkey does to.....go figure.....




SEE:

Breaking Out Of The Cultural Burka

Catholic Hajib

Watch How You Dress

Why We Fight

The War For Women's Rights

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