More bits and pieces

Who will stand up again and speak up against people like Susan Riley and Time Magazine who compare the fight against global warming and climate change to WWII and fighting the Nazis? It isn’t. It’s not the same thing. People aren’t being killed in the millions just for what they are.
Those who think that cheapen the sacrifice of people in the war. Shameful.
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In the Atlantic Monthly, Jonathan Rausch talks about incrementalism. It’s alright if it’s going to the right. Too often it’s going to the left. When did bringing in health care insurance in the US from any perspective ever represent anything less than a radical shift. Apparently it’s fine when incrementalism goes to the left, but when it goes to the right, it’s radical.
What does that make Reagan and Thatcher?
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The Clintons: He’s a little bit country, she’s a little bit rock and roll.
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History works in strange ways. If Churchill had not been in exactly the right place at the right time, he would have been bankrupted in the late 1930’s as his political enemies tried to do to him and tried to move him out of his seat.
Forget about all the other torturous things that would have happened to the world. But think about how he would have been remembered. Likely, a failed politician, a minor historian of some talent and another example of a Churchill gone wrong politically. Possibly remembered as a bigot because he wasn’t keen on India or an oppressor of the worker because of his actions during the General Strike in the 1920s. Perhaps unfair, but there it is.
It’s a slender thread between sainthood and irrelevance.
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It’s very strange to see McLeans’ complaining about our energy guzzling and our supposed low ranking environmentally against the rest of the world. Strange how we do worse than Finland, Norway and Sweden. And what about the UVic professor who says if everyone gets the American Dream, it’ll be a global disaster. Smug. Victoria is secure and rich and she would condemn people to poverty in the name of the environment. It’s the ultimate statement of declinism, only overshadowed by the other bizarre complaints that one of the things we should worry about is that our homes are three times as large as they were in the 1950’s. Last time I checked, that’s progress.
Whatever happened to the report in which we were told over and over again by everyone from the Globe and Mail to the CBC that we have only earned as much this year as we did in real terms in 1980. So what? We can do more with that money. That’s progress too. With the same money, our houses are three times as large.