Gods of the Copybook Headings

Col. Cy Peck, VC

A Canadian original:

Of United Empire Loyalists stock, Peck commanded the 16th (Canadian Scottish) Battalion in the First World War (a regiment that boasted four VC winners), and led his unit from the front in 10 major battles of the Great War with his personal piper at his side. When the 16th Battalion left Vancouver for France in 1915, its strength was 1,125 all ranks. 

With reinforcements, the unit suffered 1,412 killed and 3,292 wounded in 3½ years of fighting — a toll that puts our casualties after seven years in Afghanistan into perspective. Cy Peck’s story is told in a new book by his son, Edward. Titled simply Cy Peck, VC: A Biography of a Legendary Canadian(itls), it’s a short book (210 pages) available at Chapters/Indigo or www.cefbooks.ca). 

What’s unusual about Peck, as colonel of the regiment, is not only fearlessness (leading his men under heavy machinegun fire and pointing out targets for tanks), but at age 47 he was the oldest Canadian ever to win the VC.

Bravery on the battlefield matched with moral courage:

Peck finally reported for duty in Parliament on March 4, 1919, taking his seat as the member for Skeena. He arrived just in time to hear Sir Sam Hughes, the ousted minister of defence, attack Sir Arthur Currie, the former Victoria school teacher who had led the Canadian corps from June 1917 to the end of the war. 

That brought out the warrior in Peck, and his maiden speech as an MP was in defence of Currie, who was respected by the men who had served under him. Peck's speech was eloquent and from the heart, dealing with Currie's decisions, the accuracy of Hughes' attack and the high price of war. It included these words: 

 "There are thousands of bleeding hearts that will never be healed; thousands of mothers, fathers, sisters, wives and sweethearts who are listening in vain for that footfall upon the garden path that will never sound again."

Death - Russian Mafia Style

Our gangsters are much too boring to do this:

In true gangster style the showy tombstones display many of the men they symbolise wearing clothing preferred by mafia men during the bloody era.

Russian enthusiast Alan Gignoux, who visited the graveyard this summer, said: "Most of the images showed men clad from head to toe in 90's Mafiosi leather.

"Some of them even had their speciality etched on the tombstones such as 'judo sixth dan' or an 'expert in the use of knives'."

On the Plains of Abraham

Desmond Morton takes a new look at 1759 and all that:

Were they? What about the Canadien militia, on their bellies on the battlefield? No one had told them to flee, though doubtless some did. The rest stood behind trees where they were, shooting, like Wolfe’s men, as fast as they could reload, and hitting their obvious targets. The Frasers, sent to annihilate Montcalm’s terrified regulars, were stopped, not just once but five times by the Canadiens. So were other regulars, sent under General James Murray to stop the French retreat. Thanks to the Canadiens, Montcalm’s regulars reformed their ranks at Beauport and marched to meet the Chevalier Lévis and the rest of the French army. They then withdrew to Montreal, leaving their militia comrades to fend for themselves. On Apr. 27, 1760, at the battle of Ste. Foy, they would take on Murray’s garrison in a return engagement. They would beat the British as convincingly as Wolfe had defeated Montcalm. If a French fleet had come up the St. Lawrence, the Battle on the Plains of Abraham would hardly be worth remembering. Quebec would be French.

il ne regrette rien

Bob sings his old songs:

Regrets? Bob Rae has a few.

But unpaid leave for public-sector workers – or "Rae Days" – is not one of them.

The Toronto Centre Liberal MP's once-blond hair is snow white, thanks in no small measure to his days as Ontario's first NDP premier from 1990 to 1995.

His almost five years in office may be best remembered for the policy forcing public-sector workers to take up to a dozen unpaid days annually for three years to save jobs and almost $2 billion.

Those tumultuous days, when Ontario was in the grips of a deep recession, come flooding back for the 61-year-old Rae when he hears Ontario Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty is musing about imposing unpaid days on provincial, municipal and hospital workers and others who draw a paycheque from the taxpayer.

From the big-government perspective it was the "compassionate" thing to do. Better to force people to take unpaid days-off that firing them en masse to save money. Not being very "compassionate" when it comes to other people's (coerced) money, I would have preferred a massive round of layoffs. For all his faults, that's exactly what the Mike Harris government did shortly there after. Lenin once observed that capitalists were so short sighted they would sell rope to their own hangman. It seems unions are no more perceptive. Had the Ontario union movement not failed to understand that Rae was trying to save them, a less fiercely anti-union government might have come to power in 1995.

"Blogger Seized From Streets of Havana, Beaten, Released"

Where communism still lives:

Trail-blazing Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez says she was headed to a peaceable march against violence with friends in Havana Friday when she and fellow writer Orlando Luis Pardo were confronted by three men in plainclothes presumed to be state security, forced into a car, and assaulted. "No blood," she reported to El Nuevo Herald. "But black and blues, punches, pulled hairs, blows to the head, kidneys, knee and chest...[after being] thrown head-first inside, they applied judo or karate holds to us and the punches . . . kept raining down."

1989

William F Buckley's November 10, 1989, "On the Right" column.

When the news came in, President Bush sat quietly in his large chair in the Oval Office and said in grave tones that we must not overreact . He is absolutely right about this. JINGLE BELLS! JINGLE BELLS! JINGLE ALL THE WAYYYY! It is proper to deem it a historical development, but its significance must not affect our judgment. OH WHAT A BEAU-TI-FUL MORN-ING! OH WHAT A BEAU-TI-FUL DAY!!! After all, there is tomorrow to think about in Germany. GERMANY?!?! WHAT DO YOU MEAN, `GERMANY'? YOU MEAN WEST GERMANY OR YOU MEAN EAST GERMANY? — the score allows for many variations. Calmness is in order.

Friday Night - The Prisoner

Workers of the World! Cease to Wash

I always knew socialists were low down dirty...

It’s official: baths and jacuzzis are anti-socialist. Not for nothing do their opponents describe the proletariat as the great unwashed. That worthy heir to Kadar and Ulbricht, successor to the great Fidel as liberator of Latin America, Hugo Chavez the President of Venezuela has written a new chapter in the Marxist canon. Henceforth, nobody is to sing in the bath or the shower, since it is a distraction from the basic business of washing, and no more than three minutes is to be spent in the shower.

Just in case you think old Warner is joking.

Scenes from the Imperial Capital

A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing

The above is my one sentence explanation of why I have little time for political science:

What remains, though, is a nagging concern that the field is not producing work that matters. “The danger is that political science is moving in the direction of saying more and more about less and less,” said Joseph Nye, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, whose work has been particularly influential among American policy makers. “There are parts of the academy which, in the effort to be scientific, feel we should stay away from policy,” Mr. Nye said, that “it interferes with the science.”

In his view statistical techniques too often determine what kind of research political scientists do, pushing them further into narrow specializations cut off from real-world concerns. The motivation to be precise, Mr. Nye warned, has overtaken the impulse to be relevant.

The numerologists that dominate the social sciences labour under a delusion, the delusion that the methods of the physical sciences can be applied to the humanities and social sciences. While mathematics is a powerful tool in economics, where relatively objective quantitive data abounds, as it drifts into sociology and political science its value lessens dramatically. Human beings have free will and act from enormously complex motives. People's explanations for why they act are often false, even when they are not trying to be deceitful. Ludwig von Mises, who was perhaps too hostile to quantitative methods in economics, struck upon this problems six decades ago when writing Human Action. 

O, New Brunswick

It's not that I believe governments should be in the business of educating the young. It's not that I believe that government has any business promoting citizenship. It's that I find it galling that some people have such a problem with the national anthem. Personally I prefer the Maple Forever, but O, Canada is alright. Unless you're not too keen on the whole Canada part.

Dozens of francophone schools in New Brunswick have applied for an exemption to O Canada after the province's education department mandated that schools that did not want to play the national anthem each day develop other activities to promote patriotism.

[…]

New Brunswick has nine anglophone districts, and five that are francophone. The National Post reached all but one francophone district yesterday, and all reported that some schools had applied for the exemption. Reports out of New Brunswick suggest there are about 40 in total, and the department is not aware of any anglophone schools opting out.

One of those wacky coincidences we're not suppose to talk about.

Government: Saving us from the Horrors of the Farmers' Market

So how's that "conservative" thing working out for you, eh?

The federal Competition Bureau has served notice to the Ottawa Farmers' Market that any informal agreements to set prices could violate Canada's new and tougher price-fixing law next March.

The Oct. 7 letter from John Pecman, the bureau's acting senior deputy commissioner, to market vendors comes after the Citizen reported on Sept. 27 that some farmers charge more for their fresh produce at the Lansdowne market than at other markets where they also have stalls.

Gerry Rochon, a farmer from Edwards who is vice-president of the Ottawa Farmers' Market, said some vendors used to have "friendly discussions" among themselves to agree on prices -- but those days are over as a result of the Competition Bureau warning.

[...]

However, next March the law will make it a criminal offence for competitors, or potential competitors, to agree or arrange to fix prices, allocate markets or restrict output, and such agreements will be illegal whether or not they actually injure competition.

Ezra Quote of the Day

"Ezra referred to himself as a "One man stimulus programme for lawyers and bureaucrats."

As seen in Sobering Thoughts 

Thursday Night - Becket

Check Your Premises

Ah, The New York Times. 

In fact, any editor certainly would cut the Bible, if an agent submitted it as a new work of fiction. But Cerf offered Rand an alternative: if she gave up 7 cents per copy in royalties, she could have the extra paper needed to print Galt’s oration. That she agreed is a sign of the great contradiction that haunts her writing and especially her life. Politically, Rand was committed to the idea that capitalism is the best form of social organization invented or conceivable. This was, perhaps, an understandable reaction against her childhood experience of Communism. 

[...]

Yet while Rand took to wearing a dollar-sign pin to advertise her love of capitalism, Heller makes clear that the author had no real affection for dollars themselves. Giving up her royalties to preserve her vision is something that no genuine capitalist, and few popular novelists, would have done. It is the act of an intellectual, of someone who believes that ideas matter more than lucre. In fact, as Heller shows, Rand had no more reverence for the actual businessmen she met than most intellectuals do. The problem was that, according to her own theories, the executives were supposed to be as creative and admirable as any artist or thinker. They were part of the fraternity of the gifted, whose strike, in “Atlas Shrugged,” brings the world to its knees.

Capitalism, in the sense she explained repeatedly, was not simply an economic system, but a socio-economic system that recognized individual rights. Had she employed the more generic term "free society," it would have failed to capture her argument. Back in the 1950s the free market was under sustained assault by the government and intellectual classes. The battleground for freedom was being fought in economics. Thus her use of the term capitalism. 

Rand had a keen seen of drama, read her books, the display of a gold dollar sign was a statement of defiance to contemporary morality and politics. She was not a narrow materialist seeking to make a quick buck. She was an artist and intellectual seeking to express her view of the world, like all artists and intellectuals. Monetary gain was nice, but it was a secondary motive. That fact that you believe sometime is a positive value, does not mean you have to dedicate your life to pursuing it. Old Publius thinks engineering and medicine are very good things, but I've no interest in becoming an engineer or doctor. It also doesn't mean I think all doctors and engineers are upright, decent people I'd like to know as friends. To assume otherwise, as the author of the piece does above, is to read Rand and her life at an extremely superficial level.

Scenes from the Imperial Capital

First Moncton, Then the World

Quot'd points to 1920s and 1930s era Canadian and American defense plans, in case either of us decided to invade the other.

The main zones of operation discussed in the plan are:

Nova Scotia and New Brunswick:

Occupying Halifax, following a poison gas first strike, would deny the British a major naval base and cut links between Britain and Canada.

The plan considers several land and sea options for the attack and concludes that a landing at St. Margarets Bay, a then undeveloped bay near Halifax, would be superior to a direct assault on the longer overland route.

Failing to take Halifax, the U.S. could occupy New Brunswick by land cut Nova Scotia off from the rest of Canada at the key railway junction at Moncton.

Imagine, Moncton might have been the key to the British Empire. Though how American politicians would have explained to the public invading a country one-tenth their size, with an army smaller than the New York City Police force, is not explained. Images of anti-war protesters flooding the Mall in Washington with signs reading: "No Blood for Maple Syrup!" or "Coolidge=Kaiser" or "Make Hockey Not War."

The rationale for the plan was that Japan and Britain were allies. In event of war between the United States and Japan, Britain would be at war with America. It's highly unlikely Britain would have risked war with America over the Japanese alliance. It's even less likely the Canadian government would have allowed itself be dragged into an incredibly stupid war. The Canadian defense plan was even more outlandish, we would have launched a surprise invasion of the northern United States. 

Wednesday Night - 2001

Tearing Down the Wall

Bush I, Kohl and Gorby met again:

Kohl, 79, who went on to become the first chancellor of a reunited Germany, appeared the most visibly moved by the moment, recalling the heady days that led up to the Nov. 9, 1989, collapse of the wall and Washington's and Moscow's willingness to let it fall.

"We achieved reunification together, with peace and freedom and with the support of our neighbours," Kohl recalled.

"We don't have many reasons in our history to be proud," Kohl said. "But those years when I was chancellor, ... I have every reason to be proud. I have nothing better, nothing to be more proud of than German reunification."

Proving that you can take the General Secretary out of communism, but not the communist out of the General Secretary.

"America also needs a perestroika," Gorbachev said, noting the push for change with the election of U.S. President Barack Obama. "A lot will now depend on America.... Leadership will have to be proven."

Scenes from the Imperial Capital

She's Everywhere!

I've never seen so many mentions of Ayn Rand in the media! She's sweeping the country! Of course, the media, being leftist for the most part, is indignant. The below article from Slate is just too amusing. The hatred really leaps off the page. The cheap shots and innuendoes. Usually only a living figure, like Rush Limbaugh, gets this kind of treatment. How does a woman, who has been dead for twenty-seven years generate such vitriol? Because of her uncanny ability to strike just the right nerve. Not bad for a "third-rate philosopher" and "mediocre" novelist:

Ayn Rand is one of America's great mysteries. She was an amphetamine-addicted author of sub-Dan Brown potboilers, who in her spare time wrote lavish torrents of praise for serial killers and the Bernie Madoff-style embezzlers of her day. She opposed democracy on the grounds that "the masses"—her readers—were "lice" and "parasites" who scarcely deserved to live. Yet she remains one of the most popular writers in the United States, still selling 800,000 books a year from beyond the grave. She regularly tops any list of books that Americans say have most influenced them. Since the great crash of 2008, her writing has had another Benzedrine rush, as Rush Limbaugh hails her as a prophetess. With her assertions that government is "evil" and selfishness is "the only virtue," she is the patron saint of the tea-partiers and the death panel doomsters. So how did this little Russian bomb of pure immorality in a black wig become an American icon?

For the Objectivists in the audience, don't get all hot and bothered. This is the MSM's way of paying her a compliment.

Conservative Government Acts Conservatively

I'll put aside my cynicism for the moment. Maybe, just maybe the government is doing this for the right reasons. Whatever the motive, this is a small but significant blow for freedom:

A Conservative MP says she's close to having enough opposition support to kill the long-gun registry in a vote on her private member's bill Wednesday. Candice Hoeppner says she has commitments from eight Liberal and NDP MPs to vote in favour of legislation that would end the decade-old registry and destroy existing data in the system on about seven million shotguns and rifles. 

 "I probably have eight (opposition) members who have indicated they'd support the bill," the Manitoba MP said Tuesday. "I would like to have 12 to really make sure it passes." A parliamentary vote in favour of Bill C-391 on second reading Wednesday won't make it law, but will send it to the next stage of legislative approval and make it that much more difficult to derail at a later stage. 

 Repealing the long-gun registry would still leave registration of hand guns and restricted weapons intact, and rifle and shotgun owners would still require gun licences.

Black Eye

There's an epidemic in Ontario. And it's not swine flu.

Illegal marijuana cultivation has reached epidemic proportions in Ontario and justice officials in the United States have branded their northern neighbour a "source country," the province's top police official said yesterday.

Marijuana is exported south and traded for crystal meth and crack cocaine, which are then brought back into Canada, OPP Commissioner Julian Fantino said.

"The going terminology is 'brown south, white north,' " he said, adding marijuana is also being exchanged for guns.

"It's a black eye on Canada when you have the United States ... refer to us as a source country of marijuana."

Investigating and shutting down marijuana grow-ops make up 60% of the workload of the force's drug enforcement unit, OPP Insp. Brian Martin said.

"60%" for a harmless weed. Well, that's not how the Commish sees it:

"(Marijuana) is the precursor, if you will, to so much of the violence and other activities ... that end up victimizing the most vulnerable communities," he said.

I wonder if anti-drug fanatics are conscious of channelling 1930s PSAs. Or that the arguments against cannabis are essentially the same as those that lead to the Volstead amendment. The difference, of course, is that middle class people find cannabis repugnant. 

Tuesday Night - Rand and Wallace

Thinking of the Children

Dalton solves a problem.

Full-day kindergarten has a few noisy advocates in the education research community, and, no doubt, near-universal support from working parents (or prospective parents) of children below kindergarten age. The specific question few are asking right now is whether there is any meaningful developmental difference between full-day and halfday kindergarten; in other words, whether this policy is likely to actually deliver any social benefit in exchange for the staggering, probably permanent cost to taxpayers. Or will it simply socialize the cost of child-care that working parents now pay to day-care centres and private nannies.

For parents lucky enough to have relatives to baby-sit, it's a non-issue. For those forced to rely on daycare and nannies (for the rich) it's a gift from the heavens, or more accurately a bribe from their friendly neighbourhood statist. Much easier to keep the kids in one location during the workday. This is another one of those "problems" created by government and "solved" by more government. One of the main reasons mothers of young children work is financial need. Thanks to punishing marginal tax rates on the middle class. It was a mere two generations ago that one parent could provide a decent lifestyle for a family of four. If the Dalt was truly concerned about his legacy he might consider cutting taxes, allowing parents to raise their own children rather than unionized government employees. The federal Liberals lost their bid for universal childcare in 2006. The Dalt has succeeded where they failed, through the backdoor of full day kindergarten. 

Scenes from the Imperial Capital

In Darkest America

Christopher Hitchens debates God in America:

I haven't yet run into an argument that has made me want to change my mind. After all, a believing religious person, however brilliant or however good in debate, is compelled to stick fairly closely to a "script" that is known in advance, and known to me, too. However, I have discovered that the so-called Christian right is much less monolithic, and very much more polite and hospitable, than I would once have thought, or than most liberals believe. I haven't been asked to Bob Jones University yet, but I have been invited to Jerry Falwell's old Liberty University campus in Virginia, even though we haven't yet agreed on the terms.

Wilson isn't one of those evasive Christians who mumble apologetically about how some of the Bible stories are really just "metaphors." He is willing to maintain very staunchly that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and that his sacrifice redeems our state of sin, which in turn is the outcome of our rebellion against God. He doesn't waffle when asked why God allows so much evil and suffering—of course he "allows" it since it is the inescapable state of rebellious sinners. I much prefer this sincerity to the vague and Python-esque witterings of the interfaith and ecumenical groups who barely respect their own traditions and who look upon faith as just another word for community organizing. (Incidentally, just when is President Barack Obama going to decide which church he attends?)

You'd think infidels, like me and Hitchens, would prefer the milquetoast Christians. Far from it. Debating mush is not much more fun than eating it. Hitch's real insight here, an insight to many fighters in the religious wars, is that the vast majority of American Christians are not ayatollahs in the making. They are basically decent people who don't completely believe the teachings of their church.  Take this bit from the article:

More to the point, though, you soon discover that many of those attending are not so sure about all the doctrines, either, just as you very swiftly find out that a vast number of Catholics don't truly believe more than about half of what their church instructs them to think.

Partly religion is a group identifier, especially for Catholics. For many Catholicism is what Judaism is to many secularized Jews, a cultural thing with about as much intellectual and spiritual significance as St Patrick's Day. Americans are not, on the whole, epistemologically religious. Events which contradict natural law - virgin births, carpenters walking on water - are laughable on the face of it. Only because they have been raised to regard religion as sacred, do they give a reluctant benefit of the doubt. When confronted with a blunt "you seriously believe this," they either back down or give hesitant affirmation. 

To get a real taste and feel for a genuinely mystical culture, look at the Miracle of Fatima. The mother of God never seems to make appearances in Time Square at rush-hour. It's usually in some deeply pious backwater among ill-educated peasants. Let's play what-if for a moment. Let's say three American children in 1917 had rushed home and told their mother they had seen the Virgin? They probably would have been smacked for blasphemy. This isn't just supposition. When Joseph Smith Jr, the founder of the Mormon Church, began announcing to people in upstate New York he had seen an angel, among other fantastic stories, he was quite literally run of town, several times. 

Americans are worldly enough to believe that the Age of Miracles has, in fact passed. The obsession with evolution obscures this. Yet just as many Catholics don't actually believe in many teachings of the church, so many creationists don't completely believe in Genesis. In some Christian circles it's a mark of unity to a subculture. Darwinian evolution isn't necessarily incompatible with a belief in God. Natural selection could be a manifestation of divine will. It is, however, obviously incompatible with Biblical literalism, which in America has always been a minority opinion among Christians. Evolution is a cultural landmark. Seized upon by secular Americans as a symbol of modernity in the wake of Scopes, the pious replied in kind. The debate about evolution has precious little to do with anything argued for in the Origin of Species. It's battle of world views by proxy. Trying to establish whose "founding myth" is correct, so to justify the rest of their cultural edifice. 

Monday NIght - Spoons

With Conservatives Like These.....

So why is Stephen Harper all chummy with Dalton McGuinty? Is that he recalls the old maxim that Ontarians vote for one party at the federal level, and another for Queen's Park? Or is it that he recognizes a fellow tax and spender?

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty and Prime Minister Stephen Harper are working hand-in-glove to gut the province's already hard hit, job-bleeding economy.

How? By simultaneously pursuing two policies that will have devastating consequences for Ontarians, continually raising both the price of goods and services and the taxes we pay on them.

Taken together, they will prolong and deepen the recession.

The first policy is McGuinty's decision to move to a 13% Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) on July 1, 2010, prompted by Harper giving him $4.3 billion of taxpayers' money to do it.

[…]

That's because it fails to take into account another policy McGuinty and Harper both support.

That is, creating a North American cap-and-trade market in carbon dioxide emissions, ostensibly to lower greenhouse gas emissions linked to global warming.

My guess is that Harper is using the cap-and-trade as protection for his political flank. See, even us evil Tories like the environment, except we want a "market" solution. Cap-and-trade is a pseudo market, created by government to trade government permits to pollute, all premised on faulty science. As with Harper's support for a free vote on same-sex marriage, it's a cynical ploy. With same-sex marriage he knew, the Tories holding a weak minority, that a free vote would fail to pass the bill. A law that would probably have been ruled unconstitutional anyway.

With cap-and-trade the Prime Minister can rest assured that a purely Canadian market would be pointless if the Americans didn't join. Thus his support for a North American "market." The Americans, however, even under Barack Obama are not going to establish a cap-and-trade system. The Democrats are using vast amounts of political capital to push their long cherished goal, a socialization of American health care. Whether it comes in stages, or all at once, is irrelevant. Whereas Blue Dog Democrats can go back to their districts and trumpet expanded health care coverage, they'll have a harder time selling cap-and-trade. A job killer, especially in key mid-western states, is never a vote winner, especially in a recession. Present sacrifices for some distant - alleged - gain make for poor stump speeches. It's not that it won't be close, the House has already passed its version of cap-and-trade. Still, it will be a long road before anything might reach the President's desk. Even if the bill passes, there will come bilateral negotiations to establish a North American market. Negotiations where Harper can scuttle a deal by playing the nationalist card. For all the Prime Minister's selling out of conservative values, he has no interest in becoming the architect of NEP II. 

Scenes from the Imperial Capital