Mid-Week Post

The crux of the work week….

Economist Don Drummond has bad news for McGuinty:

The Ontario government needs to “swiftly and boldly” implement all of the hundreds of recommendations in a massive report released Wednesday if it wants to eliminate a projected $30.2 billion deficit by 2017, warns economist Don Drummond.

“Unfortunately, we’re dealing with a harsh reality in identity here,” said Mr. Drummond, author of the 543-page report and former chief economist with TD Bank.

The audit, which took nearly a year to complete, offered 362 recommendations in various sectors including health care, education, social programs, justice and labour relations.

Ontario is living beyond its means right now, Mr. Drummond said in a news conference.

“In each sector we looked at, we can certainly both improve the quality of the service and cut the spending associated with it, but only if we introduce reforms. Not if we continue with the same approach,” he said.
Among his harshest proposals, Mr. Drummond suggests the government instill a wage freeze for doctors, that departments should not budget for any wage increases, improve the delivery of health services and ask Ottawa to be responsible for inmates sentenced to incarceration longer than six months.

The report also asks the government to consider axing full-day kindergarten, increase class sizes and raise the retirement age for teachers.

In its 2011 budget, the Ontario government had projected its deficit to climb to $16-billion, but Mr. Drummond says his projects peg it at more than double that if the province continues its current spending.

Why was he re-elected? 

The melodrama carries over to another generation: 

Liberal MP Justin Trudeau put his foot in his mouth during a 16 minute radio interview in French with Radio-Canada.

No, he didn't use an expletive this time, he did something, some would argue, is much worse.

According to the Globe and Mail, Trudeau offered a scenario whereby he might support Quebec separation.

"I always say, if at a certain point, I believe that Canada was really the Canada of Stephen Harper — that we were going against abortion, and we were going against gay marriage and we were going backwards in 10,000 different ways — maybe I would think about wanting to make Quebec a country," the Globe and Mail quoted him saying.

Trudeau has since backtracked on his comments tweeting "Canada needs [Quebec] to balance out Harper's vision that I (and many) just don't support."

Like father, like son. 

The price one pays for waking up:

Given the incredible density of the popular Liberal mind, how the readers of my articles were unable to see how the beliefs of Islam were in direct conflict with human rights, gay rights, women’s rights and basic Democratic Values, I wrote a final piece called, “Are You In Favor of Human Rights?” and that one of course got me banned from Daily Kos.  It should be noted that in one of the Loonwatch.com articles the author, a person simply calling himself “Danios” demanded that DKOS silence me and provided a link for its readers to email the editors of the Daily Kos, demanding that this “Islamophobe” be censored.  And it worked – once again proving the oil and water relationship between Islam and tolerance for free speech.

Read the whole thing.

The knee-jerk reactionaryism, the Islamist apologetics and the demand for censorship are not uncommon in liberal/leftist circles. Why such people are called “progressives” boggles my mind. Had they the vast treasure trove of proof and logic on their side, surely they would put to rest anything they thought was false and inflammatory. But there is no such treasure trove. All they have is their naivety and contrarian attitudes.

Could this be another person unable to pick up on inter-personal cues?

Using data from previous studies in Britain, researchers at Brock University in Canada claim to have discovered a relationship between IQ scores and political orientation.  The study suggests that persons of lower IQ choose to be conservatives because conservatism opposes change and is thus "safer" for those who are slow to adapt.  Not only that, the researchers find that conservatives, being persons of low intelligence, are less tolerant, less original, and less open-minded than others.

In a separate study, Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics purports to have found that highly intelligent people tend to identify themselves as liberals and atheists.  Researchers suggest that the link may reflect "evolutionary forces," as smarter humans advance the species with "new thinking," or it may result from smarter individuals competing for status by embracing unconventional and "advanced" ideas. 

There are several fallacies, I believe, behind both of these studies.  Intentionally or not, the "questions asked" -- in this case, IQ tests from as long as forty years ago that measure a subset abstract intelligence but nothing else -- were selected to arrive at the result that libs are smarter.

In fact, on all measures of practical intelligence and performance, conservatives would seem to be brainier.

Standard IQ tests have never been a very good predictor of success because they fail to measure a broad range of mental aptitudes -- everything from mechanical ability to social skills and emotional stability.  Many of these alternative mental aptitudes contribute to one's ability to function in the real world.  They comprise a set of skills that philosophers have traditionally referred to as "good sense," the sort of intelligence that liberals appear to lack entirely if we are to judge from their recent "investments" in green energy and their mishandling of health care reform.  

In contrast to the abstract reasoning measured by standard IQ testing, this deeper intelligence plays a crucial role in making essential life choices.  It involves more than solving problems on paper; it makes possible prudent choices, careful planning, and responsible behavior over the course of an entire lifetime.  The evidence suggests that liberals don't score too well on these benchmarks.  It is a fact, for instance, that those stodgy conservative sorts who marry and stay married over the period of a lifetime live longer.  They also raise children who are less likely to commit crimes, take drugs, or commit suicide.  And they end up donating more to charity and participating more in volunteer activities.  All of these measurements reflect a more profound order of intelligence that exists among conservatives and not among liberals.

Remember- Stephen Harper signed trade agreements with them and “students and creative professionals” are our social betters:

But Apple, like Nike and the Gap before it, inevitably gets extra attention because of its visibility, its success, and its monolithic mystique. When it uses Third World labour, its customers—among whom students and creative professionals are overrepresented—might well expect it to be a force for good. Under Jobs, however, Apple chose to be inscrutable and unresponsive in the face of concerns over suppliers. That strategy has, so far, worked. The company recaptured the global lead in the smartphone market for the fourth quarter of 2011, a year in which its market capitalization grew to over US$400 billion. Its latest quarterly profit was over $13 billion—the most by any company in corporate history. But how quickly might that change if consumers continue, more and more, to question the morality of buying Apple?

It’s undisputed that Foxconn City assembly-line workers face conditions that wouldn’t be tolerated in the West. Most of them live on campus in spartan, cramped dorms, and many do their jobs standing up. Laws limiting the lengths of shifts and the minimum age for workers seem to be flouted fairly routinely. Breaks are all but unheard-of. Workers have occasionally dropped dead on the line from exhaustion.

The factory is closely policed by a brutal security staff, and “troublemakers” who organize, or even meet privately to discuss their rights, find themselves blacklisted.

There has been lingering controversy over the use of hexane, which can cause neurotoxicity after chronic exposure, to clean new touchscreens prior to packaging.

(137 workers were poisoned non-fatally by hexane at another Chinese Apple supplier in 2009, and aluminum-dust explosions at two factories making Apple cases and heat sinks, including one owned by Foxconn, killed four and injured 77 last year.)

But most damning have been the Foxconn suicides: 18 attempts in 2010 and 14 deaths. Analysts were quick to point out that the implied rate of suicide was actually low by general Chinese standards, but what stood out was that 17 of the suicide attempts involved leaps from the roofs of Foxconn buildings. The impression that workers were trying to signal desperation to the world was unavoidable. Foxconn raised pay in Shenzhen and announced other reforms, but the netting it had to erect around its rooftops to discourage jumpers has become a symbol of Taylorist productivity mania run mad. Apple is in the business of selling magic and joy, and images of mass suicide comport poorly with that business model.

Do liberals even listen to themselves when they speak? Do they think before they speak?

This amateurish opinion piece says not:

Ultra liberal Martin Bashir hit a new low on Tuesday, outrageously comparing Rick Santorum to mass-murdering dictator Joseph Stalin. In a fit of vitriol, the MSNBC anchor also connected the Republican to George Orwell’s Big Brother from 1984. However, the most repugnant moment came when Bashir spewed, “If you listen carefully to Rick Santorum, he sounds more like Stalin than Pope Innocent III.”

Stalin’s useful idiot.

Where's your messiah now, Dawkins? 

(With thanks) 

 

I can’t believe someone would use dogs for evil:

A protest outside the Westminster dog show aimed at Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has drawn about a dozen demonstrators and a few pooches.

The half-hour protest Tuesday in New York by Dogs Against Romney took issue with Romney's oft-told story of travelling with his Irish setter. Romney said he put the dog inside a crate and strapped it to the roof rack for a 12-hour drive on a 1983 family vacation.

The protesters held signs that said "Mitt is Mean" and "Dogs Aren't Luggage."

American Kennel Club spokeswoman Lisa Peterson says putting a dog in a crate for car travel is the first step toward responsible dog ownership. But she says the second step is putting that crate inside the car.

Why? Be mad at whichever candidate isn't Obama but leave the dogs out of it. 

And now, a puppy is rescued from a drain pipe:

A tiny four-week-old puppy managed to crawl through a basement grate of his owner's house in west Detroit. The dachshund-pug mix was separated from its mother, and got stuck in the underground drain pipe where he remained overnight.

"It was crying, and I was crying all night, I felt so bad," the dog's owner, who asked not to be identified, told WXYZ News.

The next morning, the Humane Society's emergency rescue department came to the puppy's rescue. Unable to see the dog, rescuers used a stethoscope to track the pup's location.

What happened next was an elaborate rescue, caught on camera, which included an excavator:

"They dug a 7-foot-deep trench to free the canine, which traveled about 15 feet from the drain opening and became wedged within the pipe that connects to a storm drain line beneath the house," UPI reported.

Cats as fonts.