Ganja is not cool - do something about it then!

An enlightening article by the BBC on the use of cannabis among Britain's young: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7042881.stm

Moms giving skunk to their kids so they don't go buy from street dealers, lots of under 16's smoking the crap, people growing it on their balconies, you name it, they got it all! Now police chiefs say some parents are complacent and they should be doing more to deliver the message that doing Mary-Jane is not cool. Duh!

What else do you expect when you declassify cannabis from class B to class C? When a kid can take his parents to court for assault when they kick him out of bed and make him go to school? First you take all power away from parents and enforcement officers, then you realize you have a problem. Didn't see that one coming!

Ganja is a drug. It blows your neurons. It makes you idle. It destroys your willpower and ambition. It makes your head fuzzy. It destroys your worthy friendships. It makes you behave weirdly. It makes you waste money. Why can't people understand this, and keep rambling on about how it's not too bad and how it's better than having a cocaine problem et cetera?

If the point is zero tolerance then act accordingly. Reclassify the drug. Jail those who sell it. Hammer in the message that if you smoke skunk you won't get anywhere. Don't just sit idle and watch as the country's young plunge into smokey oblivion.

The Dutch have an apparent tradition of not being able to form a government for a couple of months after elections or resignations. Too stoned to negotiate? Do we want the same fate?

Toronto gun crime - get society back on track

Rising gun assasinations in Toronto are balanced by an increased clearance rate - Globe and Mail

Statistics is a good way to lie since its inception, but this one will not fool anyone. The aim of any city authority and any government is to prevent homicides from happening, not just uncovering the culprits.

Normal people don't go around with loaded guns shooting their peers. Normal people resolve disputes peacefully, they use the justice system, they sometimes give each other a punch in the face. To take a gun and aim it at another person is a voluntary act of senseless violence that stems from a lack of civilization. Be it a gang execution or an act of madness at the end of a heated dispute, it is the ultimate disrespect of the value of a human life.

So a big thumbs up for Toronto investigators for bringing culprits before Themis, but thumbs-down go to everyone involved in forging the bonds of a civic society that doesn't inculcate the principle of the sacredness of life into people's heads stronglynough.

While Toronto is swayed by gun murder, England experiences killings by youngsters and regular "just for laughs" stabbings. It all started when Government started meddling with parenting and the school system, making everything lenient and shielding everyone from the utter reality of failure or wrong. When everything started to be easy and guaranteed, when one couldn't be brought back on track for good, when responsibility became an opinable concept.

Whatever goes on in Toronto, it better get back on track, or we will have to get ready for more tears and gunshots. Gun murder is a symptom of society breakdown, one way or another. Do something about it before the situation gets too hard to fix.

Tax cuts - but where's the money?

Dion wants to propose a big tax cut for businesses. Lower taxes are a driving force behind a healthy economy and a guarantee of a less interventionist State. I'm all for that.

But wait, where will the money come from? One can't cut net tax revenue without decreasing expenditure. Will the liberals take out a huge mortgage on Canada to be paid by future generations? Or will they give with one hand and take with the other uder the cover of some stealth scheme?

Promises are good, show us the plan now.

Why Al?

Al Gore jointly with the IPCC won the Nobel Peace Prize? Why?

The IPCC is a sound organization which produces scholarly research and brings together people of high intellect. These guys know what they are doing, and as such deserve this Nobel fully.

Al Gore is a politician, and an unsuccessful one to begin with. Secondly, this Nobel awarded to him comes in the midst of reports about serious faults in the pseudo-gospel he preaches to the masses about climate change. He has taken climate change and made it into a good publicity tool.

I don't question his noble aims, but please spare me the insult of putting him on the same level as the scholars and intellectuals who sit on the IPCC.

The Bloc in agony?

The Bloc Quebecois is running out of steam, as is blind Quebec nationalism at last.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20071011.duceppe11/BNStory/National/home

While Mr Duceppe might relish in the knowledge that only his party is truly Quebecois, one seriously asks oneself the question of whether people actually care. To add to his ill-concealed xenophobia he garnishes his anti-Conservative and anti-Ottawa rants with slammings of multiculturalism, immigrants, English language and anything else he can think of, citing Quebec culture as ever so special as to not be manageable by some federal party that wasn't truly Quebecois.

Quebec is different from the rest of Canada, as is Ontario from Nunavut or PEI from Alberta, however speaking French more than the rest of the country seems to be a valid excuse for Mr Duceppe to lambast the Federation and claim even more protection for French in the province.

This kind of ill-aimed vitriol is a symptom of a deep ideological crisis within the Bloc. As always a party on its way into oblivion resorts to last-minute populism, trying to stir up the most mediocre feelings of those still foolable by harsh talk and gratuitious abuse. Conservatism will bury nationalism under the banner of freedom, common sense and tolerance. Forward!

Juggle your potatoes better next time, John Tory!

So John Tory lost in Ontario. Big deal. He made an amazing lot of mistakes, and had he won he'd have known it was due solely to his opponents' sins. The Conservatives might thank John Tory though. He ensured that several lessons are learned by the party and its local affiliates in one go, rather than spreading the learning process over more polls like butter over a Canada-shaped toast.

Tory's gaffes and venturing into hot topics were not helpful. In the rest of the world the Liberal parties are masters in the art of bringing their opponents down. I doubt Canada is an exception. As stated in much more depth on other BloggingTories blogs, one need not hide his opinions. However, the hottest potatoes should be dropped first, and let to cool down. Closer to election time it is time to juggle more everyday concerns.

Keeping with the potato metaphor, if one juggles cooler potatoes one doesn't burn his hands. Other candidates take note.

Recognise the plight of the Armenians!

Rice urges the Foreign Affairs Committee not to trouble relations with Turkey by ditching a Bill to recognize the genocide of Armenians by the Turks at the beginning of the last century. Earlier this week Turkey arrogantly stated that such a Bill would cause friction in bilateral relations between them and the US.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7038095.stm

Bend it as you like, what happened was not a war or an insurgency or whatever the Turks want us to believe. People were forced out of their homes, made to walk barefooted for hundreds of miles with nails in their feet and summarily killed merely because of their ethnicity (and possibly religion).

Not that the Turks were new to this kind of atrocity, just think of the massacres that occurred in Greece before it became free from the Turkish yoke. Just like then, they refuse to acknowledge any of their faults.

What happened was genocide. The Turks were trying to extirpate and possibly destroy the first Christian nation in history. If that's not genocide, I only wonder what is. With its claims to EU membership and modernisation, Turkey still fails to come to terms with its own history or its internal contradictions.

Do the EU countries want such behavior to go unnoticed at the negotiations table?
Do the US want to condone the denial and falsification of history?
Do we want to submit to the whim of hypocritical rulers who shut themselves in a closet of darkness, blindness, ignorance and deafness?
Do we want to bend our morals and integrity to suit a country that never ceased being, deep in its heart, Islamist and revisionist?

Armenians all over the world are crying out for justice and fairness, to have their plight recognized, to have the memory of their lost kin enshrined alongside those of the millions of innocent victims of blind hate and murderous madness.

If Turkey wants to be modern it has to recognize its past mistakes and learn from them. Otherwise a dangerous precedent will be set that will destroy the EU's moral stance and integrity.

Rice is spitting on the memory of all genocide victims. Excellent foreign policy tactic, Condi.

Northwest Passage belongs to Canada and USA

Somehow the opening up of the Northwest Passage seems to be heating up the tempers in the US and Canada. Reason: they can't agree on who controls the route. To make matters worse, other countries are pushing their claims to rights of exploitation of the route for shipping.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7033498.stm

A basic look at the map shows very clearly that only Canada and the US can claim those waters, with an option for Denmark in case ships want to sail close to Greenland. A ship would enter the Arctic through the US-controlled part of the Bering Strait, sail along the Alaskan coast and then enter Canadian waters, exiting in Atlantic Canada.

I'm not a geographer nor a lawyer, but claims by other countries to that route seem ludicrous to say the least. If I discover Russia is one of the claimants I will laugh: they claim half of the Arctic seabed for themselves and want free rein in the Northwest Passage as well!

If that route will need maintenance of any sort (icebreakers or other routine operations) then it will only be fair for a joint US-Canadian venture to charge fees for the route's use. If there's no maintenance then standard territorial water rules should apply. Ultimately if you don't want a ship in your territorial waters why should you let it in through that Arctic backdoor?

Proportional Representation sucks. Full stop.

This matter has been debated ad nauseam on Canadian blogs, but it deserves unlimited mention due to its importance. The introduction of proportional representation in Ontario, to any extent, is wrong. Politics is never a one-man game, however the relationship between a representative and his/her constituents is a sacred bond that PR severs.

First off, PR puts all the political power in the hands of the party apparatchiks, who reward obedience to their whim by assigning candidates to higher positions on the list. Parties demand a degree of ideological consistency among their members and candidates, but PR is the starting point of dictatorships within the various parties that fight the elections. If progress is driven by the difference of opinions and debate, the connection between PR and the degradation of politics is plainly evident.

Secondly voters have the right to know who they are voting for. They have the right to quiz the candidate and make their decision based on the candidate's merits. PR takes the candidate's individuality away in favour of a general and frequently insipid platform, designed to address some major issues, leaving local issues to sort themselves out somehow.

Which leads me to the third argument against PR. A representative is the voice of the people that vote for him/her. Many local issues need a hand (or a reminder) from the central authority to be addressed, such as road by-passes to ease congestion. With the current system, a local candidate has to be aware of local issues and bring them to the attention of the institution he will belong to if elected. In a proportional system it is unrealistic to expect tens of candidates from the same party to agree on a list of local priorities since they probably won't feel any attachment to any particular district anyway.

Italian politics has been marred by PR since its inception, making it a mediocre political system that reeks so much you can smell it a mile away. Ten years of first-past-the-post didn't help either, since smaller parties didn't just vanish. Instead, they formed coalitions with larger parties and demanded to have candidates fielded in safe districts in exchange for their support.

PR culture is like a cancer: you can't cure it. Don't let this kind of junk into Canadian politics, or the consequences will be felt by our descendants as well.

Propriety Police - God save us from such stupidity

While the US are realizing that spreading democracy isn't just about Election Days, Starbucks and rock music, the party most governments prefer to deal with in Palestine (Fatah) sends out a new kind of police, the "Propriety Police". These guys are charged with the amazingly vital task of ensuring that improper behavior does not occur during Ramadan, such as smoking, eating before sunset and social interaction between young men and young women.

Right, is this the kind of behavior we expect from the moderate party we deal with? We froze all funding to the Hamas nutters because we deemed them radicals and terrorists who didn't recognize Israel, but Fatah is no better deal. Having tasted the rampant radicalism in certain segments of society, they are keen to monkey those whom they earlier despised. Rounding up to the lowest common denominator is, as usual, the easy way out.

What hope can there be for a society where a blatant denial of rights and freedoms by a government is at best greeted with enthusiasm and at worst just frowned upon? If I want a sandwich I should be free to get it at any time, be it day or night, from someone who is willing to sell it to me.

Be it Propriety Police, a National Committee for the Prevention of Nose-Picking or any other nonsense it has no place in a society on the way to progress. Bland attitudes to such patronizing behavior are a symptom of complacency and gullibility.

Considering the kind of ranting they hear all the time from their local radical leaders the hopes for progress in what used to be one of the Middle East's most promising pseudo-democracies look bleak. If they are visible at all.

Today is Thanksgiving Day. Among the thanks we raise to the Almighty, thank Him for the precious right to think and decide for ourselves that Canada and other real democracies grant us.