Israeli Apartheid Week- Howling Barbarism with a Thin Veneer of Education

Canadian universities will soon be hosting Israeli Apartheid week.  This truly is a revolting display of hypocrisy and ignorance.  You see, it's mostly leftist groups that organize this, including gay and lesbian rights groups.  As an article in the Ottawa Citizen pointed out, this defies the most basic of logical constructs.

How far our universities have fallen from their mandates.

Update: Global Warming Expert Effectively Confesses to Junk Science (Click Title For Link)

Yeah, this from a British newspaper.  Now, before people start giving me the standard garbage lines about media hysteria (Yes, Q, it is garbage), keep several things in mind.

• The Scientific Community(TM) has been claiming the science is settled and demonizing those who disagree
• The whole point of the AGW movement is to enforce draconian social change on capitalist society

• AGW proponents have essentially been using Positional Authority (I'm a scientist, therefore credible and in charge) to bulldoze opposition, so attacking their credibility is fair game

The scare tactics of the AGW crowd are unraveling as  their "experts" are revealed to in fact be activists.  As I have said many times before: I have nothing against the environment. Recycling is fine, pushing for green energy solutions is fine.  Enforcing global governance because of a pack of activist hysterics in lab coats IS NOT FINE!

Call me a human supremacist if you like, but even if AGW were true it would not be a valid reason to fundamentally curtail the liberty of the individual.  The continued prosperity of the human race is more important to me than the maintenance of the ecosystem as-is. Things change. Get used to it.

In Anticipation of the Day; Why I Dislike V-Day

Valentine's Day has become the most irritating of institutionalized holidays.  I hate it.  I hate it when I'm single, and the rare times when I have been in a position to go on a date on the day, the job has mercifully saved me from it.  I would not like it on a boat, I would not like it with Navy's Goat... You get the picture.  So, in proper Canadian Parliamentary Debate Style, I will elucidate my disgust for this most saccharine and pitiful of holidays.

To my Delight, Global Warming Alarmism Takes a Beating

You know when the Globe and Mail starts running commentary saying the cause of Global Warming is lost, it's a good week for me.  I've maintained, as my friends know, that the science behind the IPCC has been questionable at best.  I have maintained that my position is logical and reasoned; I am not pro-pollution, but I am anti-world governance based on shaky evidence.  Not to mention, out of cynicism I know it doesn't work.  The Chinese certainly aren't upset about emissions. Regardless, read on to get some fun links!

Narcissism and Its Effect on Politicial Behaviour

Recently, I saw a couple of articles in the Globe and Mail that made a lot of sense to me. More importantly, they explained the manifestly bizarre political behaviour of my generation.

In the first article, someone had studied the demographics of dating websites, from the supposedly pure e-harmony to the more tawdry AdultFriendFinder. My own experience, with e-harmony and as a social experiment on myself, had been infuriating and traumatic. Naturally, I wanted to know why. In effect, the article explained that the majority of dating site users are women. The majority of these women also have no intention of ever actually meeting any of their admirers. While this certainly reduces the chances of said women becoming the next centrepiece on a hysterical 48 Hours special, it really raises a lot of questions. Apparently, most of these women also already have boyfriends; these women are doing it because they have a need for someone to tell them they are pretty. Their boyfriends don't do it because North American society mandates that for Attractive Male X to seduce Attractive Female Y, he must be discourteous and neglectful to demonstrate his masculinity.

Bear with me, this really is going somewhere.

Haïti

Haïti, as I'm sure every human being on the planet is aware, suffered a catastrophic earthquake that destroyed what little infrastructure kept the country from complete chaos. One cannot deny the depth and gravity of the human suffering there, and the generosity of average Canadians is truly humbling. However, three things have come to the surface of my thought as the coverage of the crisis continued.

Firstly, North Americans have developed an unpleasant fascination with the suffering of others, especially if they quite frankly are a visible minority. Since the current iteration of human society values non-violent and humane virtues, there seems to be a new and repugnant need for spectacle. It is considered too barbarous to display an appreciation for combat (can you imagine university professors discussing the last UFC fight?) therefore, we have sought a new arena to be seen doing something "impressive". Charity has in effect become a spectacle. During the crisis, we were inundated with footage of starving, filthy Haïtians. The commercial breaks were almost entirely the perversely sympathetic works of World Vision, and the like. Some argue that the visceral imagery is needed to shock people to action. If this were true, why do we need to see new footage every year? Simply stating that the problem remains would do. It strikes me as particularly self-centred, culturally speaking, that CNN had reporters on the ground in Haïti before the US Marines could begin deploying food aid. I assure you, the US Marines are almost as good as our DART at delivering aid, and they have more, bigger, and faster ways of getting it there. It speaks ill of our society that we are so desperate to see the suffering of others that we are better at getting footage of them starving than we are at feeding them.