That Jewish State Thing

A UN human rights panel has come down against Israeli's attack on a Turkish ship that tried to run the Gaza blockade this summer. The report may be thoughtful and balanced, or it may not. I have no way of telling.

But here's the thing.

I would rather see the rest of the Middle East engulfed in flames than see one hair on the head of the Jewish state damaged in any way.

I admit that it is irrational. It is also non-negotiable. In the same way that I will defend to my utmost ability the safety of the Roma and the rights of homosexuals.

I believe it is simply what must be done by people who care deeply about right and wrong.

To be brutally honest about it, the world gave away its right to moral judgement over these three groups of people when it turned its back on them half a century ago. No balanced and thoughtful UN committees can ever change that. No reasoned finding by any celebrated judicial bright-light can ever wipe away the need to right a grievous wrong that was done. Nothing will ever change the fact that desperate people knocked on our door and asked for help, and we turned them away.

We may kack away at it all we want and pretend to be fair, balanced and thoughtful, in a good modern liberal way, but when we side with Iranian nutbars and UN human rights commissions that are dominated by brutal dictators, we are merely brushing our failings under the rug. We are re-arguing the inarguable -- See! They weren't really nice people! See! It's only understandable that good, decent people could get so vexed up with them that they were forced to try to exterminate them!

Let us not do this again.

Euro Anti-Sealers Create Opportunity for Canadians

How's this for unintended consequences?

Because of the European Union ban on seal products, which went into effect last month, Scottish kilt makers are turning to the skins of cute little ponies and bunnies to make sporrans for their kits. Animal lovers should be appalled. Many Scots are upset about the assault on their culture. And the change probably isn't appreciated by Scottish kilt buyers either.

According to today's Scotsman, the new-age sporrans don't look as good as the traditional seal-skin ones. They probably won't wear as well either.

Who wants to pay more than $1,000 for authentic Scottish kit, only to have it topped off with a piece of blather that looks like a 1950s Japanese knock-off?

Here's an excellent opportunity for Newfoundland outports to join forces with Inuit hunters, hire a few accomplished sporran-makers, set up a factory and offer Scots garb wearers the online chance to buy the real deal -- at a premium price, of course.

Let the Europeans wallow in their moral superiority -- as they slaughter their unwanted ponies and rabbits. But also let them pay the price of their arrogance. That's food on our tables and money in our pockets.

Maybe we should egg them on to ban trade in sheep products and beef products so we can get the whole darned thing.

Dealing with the Taliban

A story in the papers this week suggests the Taliban and their supporters are pumping poisonous gas into educational facilities for girls.

Ho-hum. And on we go.

Here's what I'd do with that little tactic.

Make a list of Afghani towns, ranking them according to their acceptance of a Taliban presence.

When something like this happens, pull out the list, pick the town that is the "softest" on the Taliban and...I don't know...bomb their municipal offices, humiliate their leaders or drag out a few men and cut off their noses. Just do something disgusting and terrifying.

If another girls' school is attacked, move down the list to number 2 town. Drag out a few influential males and cut off their ears.

Repeat as required.

See how long it takes for the attacks to stop.

End of story.

Learn from Ghengis Khan and the Romans. Live long and prosper.

Wait a sec!

Oh, those Faroe Islanders.

A couple of weeks ago, I was ranting along about the enviros picking on the poor, innocent, little Faroe Islanders and their understandable desire to keep up their traditional fishing lifestyle.

Well, seems those Faroe folk are not as innocent as they seem.

http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/scotland/Fishermen-blockade-ship-in-mackerel.6480105.jp

In fact, they seem to be hell bent on sparking another fish war between Iceland and Britain. I don't know who is right in this argument, but I do know that the Faroe Islanders are at the root of it...again.

Maybe it's time to ask the fundamental question. Who are these guys, and what are they up to?

Which goes to show...things are not always what they seem. And you're not always right.

Tough guys; tough targets

Sea Shepherd and friends have bravely assaulted another fortress of environmental evil.

Moving courageously behind enemy lines, the plucky environmentalists have exposed the latest heinous crime of yet another declasse people living a disgustingly primative lifestyle. This time, it's the Faroe Islands, a collection of fewer than 50,000 descendants of the Vikings who cling tenaciously to their traditional fishing lifestyle. Their crime is the annual "slaughter" of pilot whales, apparently a food source for these backward rubes.

Let's listen in.

"The disembowelled bodies of brutally slaughtered whales line a dockside just 230 miles from Britain - as families with children wander among them, according to a report from The Sun."

Imagine that! Only 230 miles from the almost-centre of all that is good and holy in this ever-so-precious 21st century. Butchered bodies on the beach...and children wandering among them! What savages!

The environmental Cromwells must be warming up for another full-frontal attack on marginalized Newfoundland outposts.

Be warned, you evil widows and orphans. You filthy throw-backs who wrest your meagre living from God's seas and soils and gardens. The enviros are coming to unmask you!

Tragic. Simply tragic.

The Left has lost me

Anti-Semitism is a deal breaker for me.

Because of the time I was born, the things I've seen, the books I've read, the people I've known and the myriad of positions I've taken throughout my life, I cannot support any organization or ideology that advocates or condones any form of hatred for Jews.

The Holocaust happened. Pograms happened. The Inquisition happened. The insidious persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union happened. I don't know why these events happened. I will never understand this sick, deep-rooted obsession, but I recognize that it has existed for a long time, that it continues today and that it can flare up at any time, in any place, among the most unremarkable of people.

Anti-Semitism has even happened here, in the magical land of diversity.

My mother used to tell me about her summer jobs in Ontario's resort country, when she would walk down the streets and see signs forbidding Jews from visiting this store, or patronizing that restaurant. She complained that they would walk in groups, these Jews, and force you off the sidewalk. Pushy, you know. Yet she never linked these sidewalk hogs to the gentle, soft-spoken couple she worked for. They were Italian Jews with two young children, who had landed in Canada after a horrific run across Europe, fleeing for their lives from Mussolini's Italy. She quite liked them, enjoyed the children and admired the talented young doctor. Maybe she saw them as cultivated Italians rather than pushy Jews. I don't know.

She never linked these quiet, worthy people with the hateful signs she saw in the streets. As far as I know, she never wondered how those signs made them feel.

That's why it pains me when the Left fixates on the misdeeds of Israel. I listen to the stories of the Left very carefully. And my spidey senses tingle. Maybe I'm overly sensitive, but I can feel a a familiar undercurrent. There's an echo of stories told before the Pograms and the ghettos and the hand-lettered signs telling Jews they were not welcome. The old stories of financial and political control. The old tales of cunning clannishness. Jews who push their way into places they don't belong, whether those places are in the Middle East, or Berlin, or on the pre-war sidewalks of Jackson's Point.

This would, of course, be of little consequence to me if I were not a lifelong liberal who had once found a happy and comfortable home on the left. Today, however, I find myself drifting and homeless.

So I still long for social justice, agitate for workers' rights against corporate power, promote the enlargement of democracy, push for liberal values and advocate equality. But I must do it without the Left.

Because anti-Semitism will always be a deal-breaker for me, and the Left, I fear, has strayed into a place I will not go.

And I don't know where that leaves us.

Don't call for help in Scotland

An inquiry into the drowning death of two fishermen in Scotland had this to say about the reaction of local firefighters to the crisis...

"RESCUE workers listened to the last cries of two drowning fishermen as they waited for a Strathclyde Fire and Rescue boat to arrive because they had no training in water rescues."

They were yelling back and forth to the men in the water. Then the cries stopped. And they waited 20 minutes more. When the experts finally arrived, they didn't come with the expected boat. They came with a rope -- the same type of useless rope that the rescue workers already had.

So two men slipped to their deaths in the dark, cold sea, and the people who call themselves rescue workers stood there like mooks listening to them drown because they weren't "trained" in water rescues. The one man who had wanted to try a rescue was dissuaded because it was judged by his colleagues to be too dangerous.

This is not the first time in recent months that emergency workers of one kind or another have stood aside while people have died, perhaps needlessly, because the situation was deemed to be too dangerous for a rescue attempt or the designated rescue workers lacked training or they didn't have the requisite equipment to affect a rescue. Or whatever.

One might ask what earthly good these people are, and why are they being paid to show up for work each day.

What a bunch of flakes.

I Think

The single most important thing a person can do is question every assumption he or she makes.

There can be no certainty, ever, about anything.

And that means no knee-jerk acceptance of any ideology or partisan talking points or seemingly right-thinking position about anything.

Why is that so hard to do?

Between reality and rationalization lies...class war

I think I live somewhere between reality and rationalization, but I could merely be whining, or trying to excuse a poor work ethic. Success in the things that matter to me seems so elusive. Is it a failure in me? Or a distortion in the world around me? Am I to blame? Or is the world in some way unfair?

I confess I don't know the answer. But I do know that I find Hermione Lee's piece in today's Manchester Guardian to be deeply distrurbing and, yes, even depressing. The critical paragraph goes like this:

Penelope Knox came from a writing family, "a family where everyone was publishing, or about to publish", and has written about that environment with eloquence, tenderness and wit in The Knox Brothers and in pieces about her childhood. Her uncles – the cryptographer and classics don Dillwyn, the Anglican priest Wilfred, the famous Roman Catholic convert Ronald – were intellectuals of idiosyncratic brilliance, competitive, eccentric and learned. Her aunt, Winifred Peck, was a prolific and talented novelist in the Angela Thirkell vein. Her father, "Evoe" Knox, was the editor of Punch and a fine comic journalist. Her mother, who died when Penelope was 18, had been an English student at Somerville College, Oxford, and wrote abridgments of classic literature (Pilgrim's Progress, The Pickwick Papers) for schools. Her stepmother Mary was a gifted artist, the daughter of the illustrator of Winnie-the-Pooh, EH Shepard. Her brother Rawle, a dominant and energetic character as a boy, became a journalist after his incarceration in a Japanese prison-of-war-camp. He also wrote a life of Shepard in 1979, to which Penelope contributed a vivid chapter. They had collaborated before, like many middle-class children of their era, on a nursery magazine. As a child, Penelope was an early reader ("I was praised, and since then have never been praised so much") and an early writer.

I'm sure Penelope Knox was an excellent writer, and her novels are probably worth reading, but they are not the types of things I read and they most certainly are not the types of things I would ever write. How could I? My family looks nothing like that. No acclaimed writers or illustrious converts to Catholicism. No classics dons or cryptographers. No Oxford abridgers, brilliant eccentrics, illustrators or gifted artists. Not a one. Not anywhere in the family tree.

So I am left to wonder if the grandchild of a coal-mining Welsh farmer, the daughter of a Toronto carpenter, the niece of a self-employed Dundee painter, or the great-grandchild of Presbyterian school teachers from the Kingdom of Fife could ever succeed in the literary world that embraces Penelope Knox.

I think not. And I think it's mainly a class thing.

But then again, maybe I'm just not working hard enough.

So Tired of Ideologies

Politics used to be good fun. It isn't now.

Politics, as we know it today, has been hijacked by screaming ideologues of the right and the left.

Neither can be trusted. Neither can be made sense of. Neither is interested in anything other than TOTAL WORLD DOMINATION of public discourse for their own murky purposes. Both grind their ideological axes exceedingly shrilly. Their all-encompassing background screech makes reason flee and rational people fall silent.

They give me a headache.

I don't much care about the Right. In my experience, right-wingers have always been looney tunes in a self-serving, cat's-paw-for-the-would-be-elite sort of way. I am comfortable in my faith that their hidden agenda will inevitably support policies that support middle-aged white guys who want to retain their privileged rung at the top of the social ladder. No mystery there.

But the Left? Holy-crapoly, what the heck can we to make of the Left?

They support the most backward, repressive social organizations on Earth simply because they are anti-American, anti-Western and -- dare I say it? -- anti-liberal. They appear to hate all industrial workers because industrial workers don't have advanced academic degrees in the social sciences or liberal arts. They despise middle-class people because middle-class people are so boringly WalMart. They dabble in a deep-ecology philosophy that urges the extermination of "surplus" populations, loves trees more than people and advocates artisan beaded bags over the advancement of human civilization.

For them, Hillary Clinton was too old and too female to be president. Autoworkers are too redneck to care about. Rural communities are too declasse to survive. All business operations are multinational greed machines. Israelis are evil. Palestinians are plucky. Iran is a hoot. America is always wrong. And the murderous Taliban are just a bunch of big-hearted freedom fighters with whom we should sit down and talk.

What a crock of knee-jerk stupidity.

Enough of these ideologues.

Boycott European products

They're at it again, those Europeans.

They destroyed the fur trade that built this country. They devastated our Atlantic fisheries. They don't like us cutting down trees or digging minerals from our lands. Now they refuse to buy our seal products.

The time come to stand up against them.

No matter what you think of the seal hunt, no self-respecting Canadian should tolerate being dictated to by a bunch of self-righteous elites who value the lives of seals above the well-being of many of our fellow Canadians.

Here's a thought. Maybe our fellow Canadians have the right to their cultures and their livelihoods.

These blowhard Europeans, however, are prepared to sacrifice ancient Canadian cultures -- be they indigenous communities or coastal Newfoundland fishing villages -- so that they can demonstrate how morally superior they are to us redneck colonials who live off the land.

These self-serving Europeans are quite prepared to accept any behaviour -- from dog-eating Chinese or whale-killing Japanese -- if it serves their economic purpose. But they can't tolerate our seal products? Give me a break.

Europeans are Inuit killers. They're Newfie haters. They attack the weakest and most vulnerable among us to make themselves look good to their politically correct friends. They and their American fellow-travellers think they're still the colonial masters who tell Canadians what they can or can't do.

There's not much we can do about them. Except this. Don't buy their products. Not one. Ever.

I Guess You Do Have to Believe

Lessons learned.

Don't give up after the first week. Continue on until the end. As we always have. And always will do.

I misjudged this Olympics thing, because I listened too much to the malcontents of the Left and Right, from Canada, the U.S. and, above all, Europe. And they turned out to be as supericial and wrong, as they always turn out to be.

No matter what any one says, these were a great Games for Canada.

So maybe we should do it again some day. One day. Some day.

It was a gas, my fellow Canadians. Thank you for being you.

In the Trenches of Economic Development

Richard Florida just sent this link out via his Twitter account -- http://www.onlineathens.com/stories/022110/opi_565570387.shtml

It's an article about a town in Georgia trying to overcome a negative image to kick-start a sluggish conomy in recessionary times. It's worth reading because it is true. I think Florida's point is that economic development is hard work. It's not a glitzy, easy-bake quick-fix. It's a hard slog that pays dividends slowly, if at all.

My favourite example of that truth is Sudbury, a city that found itself on the lip of an economic abyss in the early 1980s. Only those who were inside the crisis will ever know how close Sudbury came to losing it all in those frightening years. Federal industry minister Tony Clement can prattle all he wants about Brazil's Vale Inco saving Sudbury from a Valley of Death, but he will never know the sweaty stink of the real thing. He wasn't there in 1980-81 when nickel prices imploded, Inco and Falconbridge both danced with bankruptcy and the entire region tottered on the brink.

It was only a deep alliance of company, union and region (Wint Newman, Ron MacDonald and Tom Davies), along with a single-minded focus on survival, that pulled Sudbury back from the brink. That monumental struggle also laid an economic foundation that is helping the city surmount its difficulties today.

Sudburians of the 1980s attacked economic development as if they were a goal down late in the third, in the Gold medal game, with the honour of a nation on the line. They refused to accept defeat, they dug in, they fought back and they prevailed.

That's how successful economic development is done in the trenches, when the world is passing you by and the elites are writing you off as yesterday's news. It's not fancy formulas, or someone else's solutions, or intellectual constructs. It's just head's down, shoulder to shoulder, pushing together toward a single goal. It's street-by-street, house-by-house, hand-to-hand combat, in which inches are taken, then lost, then taken again.

Every job must be seized, every grant pursued, every program embraced and every possibility exhausted until the objective is realized.

It's hard, grinding work. But for those who find themselves on the wrong side of economic fashion, it is the only way out.

Let's Not Do This Again

I'm a big fan of the Olympics. Have been for many, many years. But watching these Winter Games unfold, I have become somewhat pessimistic.

These Canadian festivities are not turning out as we had hoped. Instead of showcasing our humble virtues to the world, they are exposing us to global ridicule. Instead of bringing us together as a people, they have become a flashpoint for the legion of malcontents that infests our public sphere. Instead of engendering pride in our happy experiment, they are stirring the grubby troll of self-loathing that lurks in the heart of all of us.

We have put our money and our mouths on the line for these Games. And what have we gained?

The financial price has been incredible. The striving to be world-class on so many fronts has frayed our national psyche. Our efforts to appear self-confidently mature have been brushed off as arrogant and gauche by the very people we had hoped to impress.

The weather has been ridiculous, equipment quixotic, security a nightmare and incompetence rife. Athletes are being hurt, even killed. Police officers are being sent home for tawdry crimes. Too few people are speaking French. And the world press is feasting on our shortcomings, wondering aloud if these bumbling Canadians have mounted the shabbiest Olympics in history.

Worse, our athletes are seriously under performing, making our "Own the Podium" mantra ring a bit hollow even to our own ears.

We look like a nation of poseurs.

In future, when the subject of hosting a big global event comes up, why don't we let someone else plan it, design it, pay for it and host it? Let someone else take the knocks of an ill-tempered, realpolitik world? Let's dedicate ourselves to attending other people's parties. We are excellent guests. We love to travel. And we can win just as many medals -- if not more -- on someone else's dime.

Let the Americans have them. They are deaf to criticism, immune to pressure and they love to show off. Or the Chinese, who are quite capable of slapping their own people into line in the pursuit of global supremacy. The Russians. The Germans. The French. Even the Koreans, who almost snatched these Games away from us. Imagine if these Games were occurring right now in Korea. We'd be winning just as many medals, at a fraction of the cost, and having just as much fun. Then, at the end of the festivities, we could just laugh and walk away, leaving the Koreans with a pile of bills and a bad case of Olympic indigestion.

It's been a slice. But...let's never, ever do this again.

A Northern Nation at Last?

Was just reading John Ivison's blog in today's National Post - http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2010/02/15/john-ivison-gst-cuts-don-t-make-the-hall-of-fame.aspx - and some thoughts occurred. Very preliminary thoughts. Possibly wrong-headed and premature. But thoughts, nonetheless.

Ivison opines that Prime Minister Harper may be seeking his legacy in the Arctic, a region that obviously attracts him and could certainly benefit from his attention. Also a region that is of great strategic interest again, given its vast natural resources and the new openness of potential shipping lanes in the northwest passage.

Well, we could probably do worse than look to the north.

Especially since this shifting focus is happening at a time when our Winter Olympics are in full swing, and we are being reintroduced to the thrill of being a northern nation. When the United States, our ideological beacon for the last 150 years, has become social, political and economic porridge. When Britain, an over-bearing presence in our colonial minds, is in a nose-down, stalled-out spiral on every significant dimension of civilization.

What an interest confluence of events.

So I ponder John Diefenbaker and his unrealized northern vision.

Maybe we will finally discover ourselves as a northern nation, and be comfortable at last with our flannel-shirted selves. No more chasing other people`s dreams. No more aping a distant empire`s culture. No more parrotting other people`s ideas and following in other people`s footsteps. Just being ourselves as best we can.

And finally building something of lasting value out of this strange northern brew.

Not the fastest, highest or strongest perhaps, but a fine northern place, full of good people doing interesting things.

We could do worse.

Democrats abandon America

Well, the Democrats lost Ted Kennedy's seat tonight. And I am thoroughly pissed with them.

Over the past year -- after electing the first Black president in America's history -- liberal democrats in the United States have managed to trash everything by descending into factious, stupid, hissy-faced bickering. They have failed to support Obama, even though they knew how difficult his road would be. They have failed to honour the hopes of ordinary Americans. They have abjectly failed to understand the responsibility thrust upon them by this great moment in history.

They have revealed themselves as juvenile, spoiled, superficial and unworthy.

The fact that they have done this in the echo of Martin Luther King Jr's special day is especially galling.

At this sad and confusing moment, I think Americans are beyond hope. They are beyond shame.

I am so disappointed by them.