How do they see us? What do they think of us? Do they think of us?
It’s funny and sad at the same time. Don’t worry Toronto, if there was any doubt before, you can now call yourself a world-class city.

It is also interesting to hear and see the coverage of the G20 protests and riots. There is one thing that puzzles me. Whatever do those people think they will accomplish, whether they are socialists, communists, anarchists, globalists, anti-globalists, greenies, or any other of the various and sundry special interests that regularly populate these things? Are they naive enough to think they might affect policy?

Propaganda

Here’s what this all is about. Propaganda. Why do they need a G20 or G8 or any other summit? It is a publicity exercise. Those leaders can and do accomplish any deals or real work in conference calls and meetings, unannounced, over the period of time between summits. Actually, the bureaucrats and lower level representatives do most of the real work. Anything that gets done is merely ratified at these summits.

So it is a public show. Likewise the protests. They are merely a public show response to the public show of the leaders. They affect nothing and they never have. Moreover, even without the rioting and violence, there is such a mish-mash of groups and special interests and pet peeves that it is all a blur for the average person anyway. And the leaders have made sure they are isolated from it. That was the reason for the large fence.

Add to that mix the professional thugs and violent anarchist types and voila! We see what happened Saturday in Toronto. Then, when the police have been throoughly humiliated, we see the totalitarian style reaction on Sunday.

Does anyone, other than the protestors themselves, remember a single thing that anyone had to say in protest? Is there any one theme that emerged? Does anyone really think that those protestors in any way represent anything approximating the average hard-working Canadian?

So now we have the extremists of every stripe, from the Communists to the far right libertarian doom sayers agreeing on one thing. The police are fascists. Doesn’t that have a nice flavour from the sixties? And all for what? For a billion dollar publicity event? What a waste of time and money. But, Toronto is now a world-class city, because they have had a world-class riot and a world-class protest event.

The Exercise of Power

The exercise of power goes on behind closed doors anyway. There is only one way that the people have really had to have an impact and that is in elections. If there is a real wide-spread concern of the real people in the real economy who go to work everyday just to feed their families and get through another week, another month; that movement will manifest itself at the ground level where the people are and the system will work the way it was intended. A bloodless revolution in the voting booth.

That is the way it is supposed to work. When that ceases to work, then there is a bloody revolution. Either way, the idiots that think there is anything to be accomplished by protest at one of these G20 meetings is out of touch with the real people. If they want to move anything, they need to move the everyday people.

Their mentality is that the leaders are the power, and just like those people that they say they hate the most, the power brokers of the monetary or industrial world, they think that they can force special attention to their cause directly from the political leaders. Guess what, if these countries, like Canada, are truly democratic, then the source of the power is on the ground, with the people. The problem is, their ideas usually don’t fly with the people, and that is why they want direct access to the political leaders, to by-pass the process of having to sell their ideas to the people.

Likewise, the large corporations and banks should not have direct access to bypass the people and affect policy. There is far too much of that going on as it is. But in the end, once there are no politicians left that can be trusted, then the revolution is not far away. Are we close to that? Some people think so, and with some justification.

Forces of Right and Left

There are those right now, as there have been for years, who see conspiracies and false-flag operations under every rock, and believe that we are being manipulated into accepting a totalitarian society. Some of them look at the events on Sunday in Toronto and gleefully believe that their theories have been confirmed.

There are those at the opposite end of the political spectrum who have been making a concerted effort to change the entire west into an entirely “progressive” political structure. They are communists and their history is one of undermining and de-stabilizing. It is a pattern that has been repeated all over the world, so we need to be aware of it and watch for it. Are we there yet? Not quite, but I can see that this summer is heating up in the U.S.

A New American Revolution

The greatest political movement that the U.S. has ever seen is underway right now, as a response to the far-left of the Obama administration and the Democrat/progressive Congress and Senate. Those on the radical far-left are aware of it and can see that the window of opportunity that they have had to influence the slower-moving progressives in power is rapidly getting smaller. They will try something or a broad spectrum of things to try to destabilize America enough that emergency powers will be required on the part of the Obama administration. The only way to avoid the public back-lash from the right is to subvert the elections of November. In order to subvert the normal election process, something on the order of a large national security emergency is required.

We will be watching. One way or another there is a revolution coming in the U.S., either a peaceful one at the ballot box, or something that gets very messy. I’m hoping for the peaceful wresting of power from the hands of the freedom-despising progressives. If conservatives gain control once more, there will be a great sigh of relief around the world among those that don’t want to see that beacon of freedom go out, and have to watch as the rest of the world slips into the new dark ages of totalitarianism.

In the meantime, the propaganda displays go on and the hard-working people who can least afford it get to pay for it. But Toronto is now a world-class city.

I Dug Up A Diamond

It will start as a new focus on the economy, and it will essentially come down to an appeal to the investors, innovators and business people that the deal is not all that bad and they will get used to it, and, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, they will find ways to make it all work in their favor as they normally do. Let’s all get along. It is now the law of the land and we might as well get used to it and get back to work.

In their heart of hearts the progressives know that nothing will work and the entire thing will be a disaster both politically and economically if the people are not on board, particularly those who shoulder the burden of generating wealth and jobs. The progressives need the hard workers in order to have someone to tax. They need the wealth creators in order to have wealth to use to support their schemes. It would have been so much easier if the Republicans had been on board, even one, so that they could have claimed bi-partisan support and given those producers a false sense of normalcy to what they have done.

But for the moment they are on their own and between now and the November elections they want to cajole the producers into to putting the economy back into gear. The state supporting media will be awash with this kind of programming, as they try to persuade the freedom loving people to help weave their own noose. Acquiesce. That is all that is required. Submit to it. Help the country out. Be patriotic they might even suggest, if Joe Biden’s record is any measure.

Ayn Rand’s description of this process in Atlas Shrugged will be acted out, played out by the progressives in frightening detail. They cannot help it. Already this process has mirrored so much of what Rand wrote that it is almost prophetic. And many of us thought her characterizations to be exagerations for effect. They will try to guilt the producers into playing along with their agenda, just until they can hit them hard again with another economic blow, assuming that the producers will just get back up and into harness again. Watch closely for the Galt effect. It has already started and will only accelerate.

And watch for their next pitch. Acquiesce.

MARCH 23 EDIT: Here we go! This from Time Magazine, offering advice to Republicans on how to be successful. Don’t fight the Health Care bill, you’ll only get hurt. As if Time Magazine has ever cared about the success of a Republican!

He is mostly predictable, although once in awhile he will surprise the listener. Today he weighed in on global warming and made some glaring assumptions. In his remarks he took shots at me as a member of the growing group that regards the man-made global warming alarmism a monstrous hoax. Let’s call those who follow the party line on this the “Warmist Alarmists”. Here’s his commentary;

Climate Change Exists Posted 3/16/2010 7:18:00 AM

Climate change has its pleasant aspects…

We spent a delightful couple of days at Mount Tremblant…ate on the patio…walked around without jackets. The snow in Muskoka is vanishing quickly. Toronto has had one of its balmiest winters ever. This winter winding down was the mildest in 63 years!

Yet people who should know better — including the dear leader — scoff at global warming.

It’s so simple. If you pump mega tons of crap into the air, you affect the climate. It can cool things as well as warm them. Look at Europe. Florida.

But it messes with them!

Unfortunately, climate change has been tagged with pointless political labels…left wing and right wing…which have nothing to do with it and get in the way of tackling the problem.

Climate change skeptics are the intellectual heirs of those who once thought the oceans had a limitless capacity to absorb our waste.

There’s lots we don’t understand. But when it gets warmer every year, when there are anomalies like cold in Cuba and drought in Australia, only greedy, short sighted idiots — the suits who own the smokestacks — would dismiss the problem as some loonie leftie conspiracy.

Let’s see. Where do we start?

“If you pump mega tons of crap into the air it effects climate.” What is he talking about? Pollution? Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t the whole global warming theory, now “climate change” theory, about CO2 and its effects? That’s very specific crap. Actually, it is the stuff that plants breathe so it’s not really crap now, is it?

He expands. “It can cool things as well as warm them.” Now this is a break through. Think about it. All we need to do is differentiate which “crap” is which, and we can raise or lower the global temperature at will by varying which “crap” we toss into the air. Brilliant. Our problems are over. Call the IPCC, there’s no more need for extortion schemes.

This recent “climate change” slogan has been advanced to cover the backsides of people who realize that their alarmist theories about “global warming” are being mocked by the actual facts, like satellite temperature readings over time. They have had to admit that the actual warming trend of the late twentieth century is now a cooling trend for over ten years. Voila! Call it climate change. How do they get otherwise intelligent people like Dick Smythe to buy in? The pre-existing hysteria created by the now discredited “global warming” alarmism. The people that slip into the “climate change” hysteria have already bought the previous hysteria.

But think about that for a moment. There is also another underlying motivator. How do we know? It’s simple really.

If we look at science and the history of the world as we have learned it, we recognize right away that there has been climate change for all of recorded history and far beyond that for millions of years. In fact, that is the reason given in many instances for the changes in the populations of various plants and animal life as well as the extinction of some of those populations including the dinosaurs, the evidence of which we have in the fossil record. So, if we state the plain fact that there is and has been climate change, anyone who approaches the issue with an open and rational mind will follow on with the question, so what?

What is so different now? Enter the man-made global warming theory and its centerpiece, the now infamous hockey stick graph. The only way that climate change could be the least bit interesting to anyone but the climatologists themselves and perhaps the farmers of the world, is if it could be demonstrated first that we have a particular strong trend in one direction; and second that it is unusual and beyond the normal fluctuations recorded in history. That is the beginnings of the “global warming” theory.

But remember, if we can show that a particular trend is either not happening, or has changed direction, or is well within the normal range of fluctuations in climate, we don’t have a case to begin with. Beyond that, it is necessary to show that there is a correlation between man’s activity and that strong trend, and finally, in the course of the investigation we must try to determine what the climate “driver” is among the various activities that man gets up to.

Let’s go one by one. The strong trend was warming, hence the global “warming” theory. But now, we have seen that the strong trend is indeed turning the other direction. The theory should be abandoned on that basis alone.

But, also, now that the hockey stick graph has been shown to be a complete fraud and yes, indeed there was a medieval warm period warmer than now, with a little ice age in between, we find another good reason to toss the whole “global warming” theory because it falls within the most recent climate fluctuations that we know about.

And then, to cap it off, the medieval warm period occurred in a time before the current industrial revolution, which leads us to that final straw, the climate “driver” CO2. The record shows us a correlation between the rise of CO2 and global temperature, but even Al Gore’s famous presentation “An Inconvenient Truth” shows us that CO2 follows temperature, so that the cause and effect relationship is reversed, meaning that CO2 cannot be the “driver” of global warming.

Can we now throw the whole thing out as quackery? Of course not. We now call it “climate change” and ride the wave of hysteria that we have created. How is that possible? Quite simply it is based on the predisposition that many people have against free markets, industrialization generally and the quite legitimate abhorrence people have been trained to feel against reckless use of resources and indiscriminate pollution that characterized the early and mid parts of the twentieth century.

Combine that with a socialist hatred of free market success, and you can call it “global warming” or “climate change” or anything you want, so long as the culprit, the bad guys are who Dick Smythe here calls “greedy, short sighted idiots — the suits who own the smokestacks” and you will have a dedicated hard-core following and a peripheral group of fellow travelers like the bitter minded Smythe.

Beyond that you have a further cadre of the enlightened leftists of government who love bureaucratic control and a large group of the guilty rich in the general populace; whose wealth has not been created by producing real goods but merely by handling other people’s wealth; who feel they must atone for the fact that they have a half a million dollar home, three cars, a boat and a cottage, and are quite willing, because they have already “got theirs”, to trash the economy for this ideology and make life well nigh impossible for the rest of us, the working poor, who just want to be left alone so we can feed our families.

It is never the ideologues that suffer the consequences of their own theories. It is always the poor man that carries the weight of it. That is the rule, and has been for time immemorial.

So Dick Smythe, the political labels are not pointless. They are absolutely right on the mark. What did we see in Copenhagen? Any objective observer, from another planet let’s say, would rationally think that a get together about climate change would be focussed on technology and methods to reduce it. But what was Copenhagen all about? Paying guilt money to undeveloped and underdeveloped nations. Carry on as you were fellows, just pay up.

As I’ve said before, it was and is an extortion scam on a scale that no doubt causes the Mafia to stand back in awe and admiration. It is generous to call it redistribution of wealth. That would give it even a smattering of legitimacy. But it certainly is a “leftist” tactic. Create a crisis and hysteria and then extort money to assuage the guilt of the rich and successful. And only a leftist could look at it and pretend it is not political.

http://whippleshire.blogspot.com/2010/03/2012-is-anti-catholic.html