Told ya so!

Krazy at the Broom points out that a European Union - commissioned inquiry into the August 2008 conflict between Russia and Georgia was started by Georgia. I always maintained and argued that was the case. Not because I'm a pro-Russian nut, but because I don't buy into Western delusions.

Just because a government declares itself friendly to the West and looks to NATO and the EU doesn't mean it is a democratic, legitimate or intelligent government. Saakashvili, the Georgian president, has no grasp of international politics and lives in his own la-la-land where he can prod Russia and the West will not only support him, but defend him in battle when the fuse blows.

Russia has no use for such a pawn, or for the two breakaway regions straddling the Russia-Georgia border. There's nothing to be had there except mountains, poverty, smuggling, regional ethnic hates and trouble begging to boil over. But when a hostile government breaches a ceasefire treaty and starts shelling your own citizens, one has to react and bury the enemy's army under a cloud of Grad missiles.

The August conflict taught Georgia a lesson: the pawn cooled his heats and toned down the rhetoric. Until that nut is ousted from office, the Caucasus will always remain a gunpowder barrel ready to unleash its shock waves.

Death of a currency, rebirth of an economy

The Zimbabwe dollar is dead and no-one is there to mourn it. Faced with an inflation rate described with double-digit exponentials, the country resorted to the least evil solution the precarious government could come up with: bury the currency.

Other hyperinflation episodes had been tackled with a variety of policies, including the famous "shock therapy" that entailed transforming the economy into a free market overnight. Obviously this option wasn't on the table in Harare. A dictator still in power with a loyal police and military cannot be made to accept sweeping reform. Incidentally, abandoning the national currency resulted in a remarkably great arrangement: three separate currencies can today be used in Zimbabwe, shielding the economy from the danger of a single foreign collapse (unless contagion sets in).

Today, Zimbabwean hyperinflation is over and its central bank has lost all its inflationary powers. It is a godsend to monetarists. Watch Zimbabwe, it might be the story of an economic miracle brought by the demise of a berserk central banking authority.

House rules

Gerry Nicholls recommends Conservatives angry at Harper after his Manning Centre conference speech should join "Homeless Cons", a site for those conservative-minded who do not feel at home in conservative parties. I won't.

In every house there's house rules, and Harper is adamant that his rules be respected in his Party. Thus "I am Stephen Harper, thy Prime Minister, and thou shall have no other Prime Ministers before me". No wonder. Small-c and libertarian conservatives should, more constructively, organize within the Tory party and get their own faction leader.

I cite the Tory Reform Group, who can be defined as the libertarian wing of the UK Conservative party. They are notoriously at odds with the rest of UK Tories over Europe, being much less Euro-skeptic than their peers. Yet they remain loyal Tories and work constructively through speeches and publications to promote a more favorable view of the EU within the party. Their influence has dwindled in past years, yet most of them are still Tory members and voters.

That's what we've got to do too. Instead of claiming being orphans we should recognize who is top dog right now (Stephen Harper), organize into a loyal faction and have our voice heard within the party. When push comes to shove a credible faction leader can lay a strong leadership bid. Just because we don't agree with our current leader doesn't mean we're not welcome. In time our effort, loyalty and work can pay off with a leader from our ranks.

Homeless Cons may give some the comfort of knowing they're not alone in their disillusionment. It is not a surrogate for changing Party policy. If the libertarians go, their ideas will be confined to the "Theory" drawer. Between sulking and grinding, I choose the latter.

In defence of Harper's speech

I read the transcript of Harper's speech to the MCBD conference and did not find it as upsetting as other conservatives have. When Harper claims Wall Street abused its freedoms he says nothing but the truth: bad debt was peddled as solid gold through CDOs and auditing companies abused (more like didn't use) their freedom to write off some securities as junk. The present credit crisis is a gigantic systematic screw-up with no justification, as the entire economy bought into a Ponzi scheme by whose comparison Bernard Madoff is an innocent lamb.

Truth is, whatever we may seek to blame the crisis on it lands two personalities on the defendant's bench: social engineering and immorality. Liberals are to blame for the former (bullying banks for the sake of equal home ownership), while conservatives could take the blame for the latter. As the idea that looks to the future, conservatives in America failed to emphasize the concept of added value and ownership.

Handing out junk mortgages for the simple sake of selling a garbage CDO isn't banking, isn't libertarian and isn't moral. Giving mortgages with a policy to add value to the branch's area, hoping to attract more professionals, more banking business and more wealth is added-value lending.

Example: a young professional is more likely to marry and make career progress. This means he or she will put more money in a savings account and bring another customer to the bank while paying back the mortgage. As more young professionals move in, the area gets gentrified, more affluent and requires more banking. That's looking to the future from a conservative perspective.

When you give out a mortgage, it's your money in play. Until we hammer this concept back into the system we will not learn any lessons from this mess. That's ownership. You own the house, but I own the risk. If ownership is the nail and regulation is the hammer, so be it. We are defending a free market in which everyone passed the buck together with a time bomb. It ain't right. Banning CDOs won't work (after all, solid debt is still debt) but we can't keep them in their present form either.

Harper's emphasis on family and faith isn't big news either, nor is it an ultimatum to libertarians. The family is the foundation of society and Harper's faith in the speech's context is the belief in the existence of good and evil beyond mere economic calculation. Don't libertarians believe in morals too? Where's the problem? Fears of a socially conservative agenda are easily assuaged: if the so-cons even try it, we will have 1993 all over again.

Harper's speech is simply stating that there's a mess to sort out and it's not just liberals who are to blame. Those balking at government spending didn't have the prospect of losing one's seat in the PMO.

He could have said some things better, and I for one take offence at the allegation that libertarians don't like to take responsibility. It's the faux libertarians who are ready to go liberal at the turn of the tide, whom we tried to defend as members of the free market who refuse to be responsible for the cleanup. True libertarians will not peddle garbage and true libertarians will not ask for a bailout.

Harper didn't walk into a libertarian meeting with the intention of alienating his audience, he still wants to win elections (duh). He merely wanted to set the record straight, that things will change after this crisis toward a more qualitative rather than quantitative approach and if someone wants to criticize the stimulus one should first try stepping into the PM's shoes. Imagine handing over the country to Dion, Layton and Duceppe, who would undo almost three years of hard work grinding through the slimmest minority.

I still like Harper. True he still throws out the occasional bungle or two, but the man has cojones. He came out in the heart of dissent and faced it head-on. We should take it as an opportunity: he is now up to discussing policy rather than just politics. We can take offence and sulk, or we can respond. This time we'll have more public attention because the media portrays it as if Harper's bullying us. Nothing's further from the truth. Were he a bully, he wouldn't have come into the Manning conference.

Abusus non tollit usum

If you are irresponsible it's still your fault. Emotion-ridden proposals to sue alcohol-producing companies for fetal alcohol damage are beyond laughable, particularly so when coming from a healthcare professional.

Mothers who abuse alcohol and drugs during pregnancy are behaving irresponsibly because they disregard the consequences, ergo they don't give a damn about the life they are carrying and destroying within. Feed me no nonsense about it being society's fault, if you drink or shoot up it's still you doing it and no-one is forcing you to. When someone wants to destroy themselves, take alcohol away from them and they will find other ways to throw their lives in the bin, like hard drugs or stabbing others for fun. Because we can't expect booze sellers and producers to take such lawsuits lightly; they will simply pack up shop and move their business to higher health professional IQ areas.

Truth is we can't eliminate or reliably prevent FASD. Education and awareness campaigns can only go as far as the recipient's common sense can take them. Irresponsible mothers will keep popping hard liquor and babies, in that order, while social services will keep popping in to take the kids away and give them to more deserving families. All we can do is jail mums whose children have FASD, inventing a crime of alcohol abuse during pregnancy. Where would that take us?

Booze is great, as myself and many other happy responsible drinkers will no doubt vouch for. We support local businesses that produce and sell good liquor products, we have a great time and thus contribute both to GDP and HDI. The misuse of this resource is no reason to force a liquor price increase for companies to cope with pay-outs for someone else's stupidity. Moreover, the inevitable higher booze prices will push the addicts into either crime to procure the money or more accessible hard drugs. Now there we'd have a BIG problem.

Schmulticulturalism

Or stupid is as stupid does. Calgary's Asian communities seem to revolt against the latest piece of decerebrate multicultural mumbo-jumbo: an "asian mall" to be built from scratch.

In a free, democratic and business-oriented country it is your right to set up shop wherever you want selling whatever is legal. The wonks at Calgary town hall somehow think an "Asian Mall" will cater to the local community. What it will do, instead, is almost certainly deprive the local community of choice, make it feel marginalized and isolated (isn't this what multiculturalism is about?) and ghetto-ize the area.

Were the local community to demand almost exclusively Asian-imported products, any shop not selling the appropriate stuff would be bust within a month in a local mall, leaving space for Asian shops. I am convinced, differing from Calgary town hall folk, that a free market would make a mall into an "Asian" one if it were truly needed.

Big Papa planners assume everyone is as close-minded as them, ergo a strong local Asian community will only buy Asian. This kind of paternalism spells the end of multiculturalism, as those who are supposed to welcome this with open arms rebel against being classified, labeled, itemized and trumped.

What would God say?

The excommunication of a raped pregnant girl's mother and the doctors who practiced the abortion in Brazil is yet another stumble by the Catholic Church. Though objection to abortion is legitimate, this case was unquestionably abhorrent, and advocating that a nine year old girl carry out a twin pregnancy and have a C-section is bordering lunacy.

Yet we are no strangers to a resurgent extremism in the Catholic Church. With the benefit of a former head Inquisitor (they now call it "Congregation for Doctrine of the Faith), the Vatican has endorsed outbursts of medieval power hunger. According to Corriere della Sera, the Vatican has lent its aegis to Archbishop Sobrinho, who not only ordered the excommunications but claimed that Church law is above State law.

What conclusions can we draw from this show of mediocrity (hint: Sobrinho is wrong)? In a world drifting toward secularism, the Church can apparently either succumb to relativism or to its antithesis, radical conservatism. In both cases, it would implode. The synthesis, on the other hand, remains to be found. It is definitely possible to reconcile a religious moral teaching within a secular legislative framework, as long as no participant expects to rule over the other's jurisdiction. The failure to grasp this simple rule is leading the Catholic Church to its demise.

The excommunication is within the Church's right, combined with lack of it in the rapist's case it becomes a right to hypocrisy. This case will further alienate more laymen from the Catholic church, in a dangerous drift that leads to his most zealous advocates confining Christ to an isolated minority niche. In all this brouhaha, I thank my parents' actions that led to me being baptized Orthodox, for my Church never expected me to belittle the importance of the law of the land I live in.

Feed migration

The feedburner-Google conversion gong show left me unable to access my old RSS feed. So, for anyone who is/was following, this is the new feed I have with Google:

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/freethinkingunabridged

The old feed http://feeds.feedburner.com/freethinkingunabridged is AFAIK an ex-feed. It's gone to the e-dustbin of the net.

Thanks for the patience.