Murphy: Harper's Majority is Preston Manning’s great achievement

Rex Murphy reflects on the Canadian election, Stephen Harper's majority win and the foresight of Preston Manning who "had the courage and foresight to start a political movement that in 20 years (with some changes) has displaced the natural governing party, and forged new realities for Canadian politics".

Full story at the National Post.

Murphy: paganism in the age of bluetooth and Twitter

Rex Murphy: Excuse me sir, that cockroach has rights

Leadership

The situation in Libya is reaching critical mass. Col. Ghadafi thumbs his nose at the United Nations resolution and continues his assaults on his own civilians while claiming to have imposed a "ceasefire". Clearly, decisive action is required quickly to prevent further atrocities. Some of the western world's leaders, including Canada, are meeting in Paris today to determine how they will deal with the situation.

Mr. Harper had arrived in Paris early Saturday morning for the summit after an overnight transatlantic flight from Ottawa, accompanied by Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon and General Walt Natynczyk, the chief of the defence staff, for the one-day meeting.

The fact that PM Harper has brought with him Foreign Affairs Minister Cannon and Canadian Forces Chief General Natynczyk says that Canada is serious about participating in possible military operations. In fact a number of Canadian CF-18 fighter jets are already in the region, presumably Italy, and reports say they will be ready for action very soon. Reports this morning indicate that France already has fighter jets in the air over Libya.

While military intervention in Libya carries risks, primarily the risk of further escalation, the leaders of Britain, France, Canada and other nations are tackling the problem head-on.

All this begs the question: where is the leader of the free world?

Update: US Sec. of State Hillary Clinton, "There are difficulties".

Update 2: Rex Murphy: There’s a great vacancy at the top of the world: A retreat by the American government from its global leadership role.

Rex Murphy

offers his unique Newfoundlander's insight on the People's Republic:

We are apologizing ourselves into impotence and irrelevancy over many of our greatest successes, while more confident — even ruthless — powers such as China are emerging brisk with the determination to develop as fast and as far as they can.

Wasting away in Margaritaville

To say that Rex Murphy has a way with words is to say that Michelangelo was pretty good with a paint brush. Rex offers his thoughts on the big climate party in Cancun.

Perhaps they know that this show of theirs is on its last legs, the jig is up, the great game is over. After the unsuccessful 2009 Copenhagen conference, they had to have realized that even Al Gore and all Al Gores’ grim little men would never be able to put the whole rickety, tendentious machine back together again. After Copenhagen, and especially after Climategate, even the true believers must have lost heart. Witness this year’s confabulation. Notice who’s not there?

Right. The world's leaders are conspicuously absent from this latest warmist gathering. The shine is off the apple. And this group of self-serving elites is becoming more and more irrelevant.

With my apologies to Jimmy Buffett:

Wasting away again in Margaritaville
Searching for a transfer of wealth
Some people claim that there's a carbon to blame
But I know... it's nobody's fault

Rex Murphy: So whatever happened to Copenhagen?

The folks predicting climate change apocalypse seem to have fallen curiously mute.

This is why the Copenhagen Conference for all its extravagant hype and buildup simply disappeared from the press and the public mind on the instant of its conclusion. Because, via Climategate, the world caught the first real glimpse of how politicized and manipulated this "greatest issue of our time" had been allowed to become. Saw as well how the sacred impartiality of science, and the great authority of peer review, had been suborned for something as political in its way as the average day's outing in Question Period.

I'm going to take this opportunity to plug Rex's book Canada and other matters of opinion.

It's an excellent read - I know, I'm currently about half way through it - of commentary on many subjects by Canada's foremost opinionator.

A cornucopia of comment from Canada’s most opinionated man — a man seen, read, and listened to by millions of Canadians each week.

Canada’s most distinctive commentator presents his fearless and thought-provoking views on a head-spinning range of subjects, from Dr. Johnson’s greatness to Bono’s gratingness, from doubts about Obama to utter belief in Don Cherry, from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s outstanding oeuvre to — well, Pamela Anderson.

The topics are as eclectic and wide ranging as the intelligence that put them together. The perspective is thoroughly Canadian, and so are many of the recurring topics and themes: of our domestic politics and our military involvements abroad, of our national identity, of human rights and human decency. You’ll find assessments of the reputations of Paul Martin, Conrad Black, Adrienne Clarkson, and Tim Hortons; tough but affectionate views of Newfoundland — of course — but also from Rex Murphy’s constant travels across Canada.

But all the world is here, in all its glory and folly. The hard-hitting attacks on politicians, celebrities, those who would ban smoking, and anyone who uses the expression “global warming denial” will have you cheering or tearing your hair out, depending. You will be informed, infuriated perhaps, but always fascinated.

You won't be disappointed.

Rex Murphy on Climategate

Given Mr. Murphy's recent departure from the Globe and Mail, I thought this clip from December deserved another look:

Rex Murphy

Pushed from the Globe & Mail... Jumps to the National Post.

It looks like it was a foray into the right-leaning opinion pages that finally landed him in hot water with the new Globe management. The Cross Country Checkup host – and long-time CBC host and pundit – penned an A-section screed for the Financial Post, December 5th, on climate change.

One of the few voices of sanity at the CBC and in the Canadian media in general. The always eloquent Rex Murphy is the Globe's loss and the Post's gain.

h/t: sda

So how do you like our green world?

Those who have been lobbying for a "green economy" no longer need to look very far to see an example of what they wish for.

We are now experiencing it first hand.

The always eloquent (and it would seem, the lone voice of sanity at our state owned broadcaster) Rex Murphy looks at our current economic situation and asks,

"Is there no light amid all this gloom?"

Well, if you are among the great tribe of global warming catastrophists, surely there is. If the industrial economies of the world are in a forced slowdown, if auto companies - the manufacturers of those demonic gas-guzzling SUVs - are facing ruin, if long-standing business are cutting their work forces by 20 per cent and 30 per cent and 40 per cent, if people are buying less and, consequently, business is making less, then surely the entire world's carbon emissions are, per necessitatem, going down. The world is burning less oil, because the world is doing less.

(...)

Thus, though it may be cruel and ironic, what the preachments of Al Gore and David Suzuki have failed to achieve, the crisis of the world's banking systems and consequent recession will accomplish.

All this should come as no surprise. At least not to those of us who have been following the radical environmental movement and the global warming fear mongers. After all, it's not like they've kept their plans a secret:

From an interview with Council of the World Economic Forum co-chairman Maurice Strong, in which he outlines the plot of a novel "he would love to compose if only he could write":

"Each year, [Strong] explains as background to... the novel's plot, the World Economic Forum convenes in Davos, Switzerland. Over 1,000 CEO's, prime ministers, finance ministers, and leading academics gather in February to attend meetings and set economic agendas for the year ahead. With this as a setting, he then says: 'What if a small group of these world leaders were to conclude that the principle risk to the earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? ...In order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring this about?'

"'This group of world leaders,' he continues, 'forms a secret society to bring about an economic collapse. It's February. They're all at Davos. These aren't terrorists. They're world leaders. They have positioned themselves in the world's commodities and stock markets. They've engineered, using their access to stock markets and computers and gold supplies, a panic. Then, they prevent the world's stock markets from closing. They jam the gears. They hire mercenaries who hold the rest of the world leaders at Davos as hostage. The markets can't close...' This is Maurice Strong. He knows these world leaders. He is, in fact, co-chairman of the Council of the World Economic Forum. He sits at the fulcrum of power. He is in a position to do it. 'I probably shouldn't be saying things like this.'"

It's not unfolding exactly the way that Chairman Mo envisioned it back in 1998.
But it's way too similar.

The modern Inquisition

From the always eloquent Rex Murphy, here is Science by intimidation from Saturday's Globe and Mail (a piece that is so well written that it must be read in it's entirety):

Truth may enter the world by many doors, but she is never escorted by force. I thought that was a lesson learned long ago, and learned by none more tellingly than scientists. Real scientists, actually, have learned it. A new amalgam has emerged however, the scientist-activist, and for that specimen it's a lesson passed by.

In the dawn of the Enlightenment, it was scientists who were hauled before tribunals and inquisitions. Galileo is the arch example, the pioneer empiricist who rejected the ancient Earth-centric model of the (then known) universe, and for his pains earned the attention and wrath of the distinctly unscientific Inquisition.

I am drawn to these thoughts, and to the long-decayed example of the Inquisition, by a most curious outburst this week by James Hansen, the principal voice of NASA on the subject of global warming, a man who played – as it were – John the Baptist to Al Gore's messianic teachings on the subject. Dr. Hansen is largely credited with “sounding the alarm” on man-made global warming, and he has been a persistent, high-profile and very aggressive proponent of the cause for over two decades now. Dr. Hansen doesn't take kindly to those who dispute his apocalyptic scenarios. I choose the term, apocalyptic, deliberately. According to Dr. Hansen, mankind may have reached the tipping point with global warming. Should that be the case, wide-scale calamity and catastrophe are inevitable. And should we not have reached the point of absolute crisis, should there be a minuscule interval for the human species to act and avert the very worst, according to Dr. Hansen, what yet remains to be faced is still horrible enough indeed.

Not all the world shares Dr. Hansen's vision of imminent ecological Armageddon. Serious minds, seriously disinterested in the subject, throw up caveats all the time. They question the models of climatological speculation; they question the peculiar mix of man-made and other likely sources of climate dynamics; they question some of the data gathering and some of its interpretation; and they question the very maturity of the highly complex, and experimentally deficient science of global warming itself.

They seriously question, too, the massive policy prescriptions that are being insisted upon as necessary in response to the scientific determinations of man-made global warming. There is lots of room for different, honest opinion on questions so large and complex, questions at the terribly complicated intersection of science, politics and economics.

But, to Dr. Hansen's agitated mind, those who raise such questions, who inject skepticism into the global warming debate, are “deniers.” The word here is becoming commonplace, but it remains a singular slur. A clutch of the global warming believers like to cast all who would argue with them into the polemical pit, the pit being that dissent from orthodox opinion on global warming as the equivalent of Holocaust denial. It is a shameless and vicious tactic, and hardly accords with the nobility that is suppose to drive the conscience of those out to save the planet. Dr. Hansen is overfond of the specious and chilling analogy: He has written of the “crashing glaciers serv(ing) as a Krystal Nacht” and, although he later repented of the metaphor, compared coal trains to “death trains – no less gruesome than if they were boxcars headed to crematoria, loaded with uncountable irreplaceable species.” This week, Dr. Hansen went a step even more noxiously forward.

He called for a tribunal, or as I prefer to call it, an Inquisition, to put on trial for crimes against nature and humanity, the CEOs of the big oil companies who, according to Dr. Hansen's frantic view of things, feed the public “misinformation” about the climate crisis. Again the implicit model is to Nuremberg, as the man attempts to put concern for a future – let us call it a probability – on a moral and factual par with the unquestioned, historical, shattering enormity of the Nazi Holocaust.

Is this a scientist speaking? If so, it is more than curious that in the 21st century it is the scientist calling for the secular equivalent of an Inquisition. More to the point, are these the words of a man really certain of his truth, or one who – with the anxiety of the fanatic – is trying to shield it from all rigour of skepticism and inquiry? In either case, I do not question at all the assertion that it is the voice of a man who is neither a friend to reason or science. This is the voice of the scientist-activist consumed with his own virtue and fearful of all dispute.

Science has no need of tribunals or trials, no need of Nuremberg justice, or analogies with the Holocaust. James Hansen's words this week were an offence, an offence against inquiry, against science, against moral seriousness. They were a piece of insolence against the idea of debate itself.

Did Hansen just play what the Urban Dictionary calls The Hitler Card? - a common last ditch effort in a heated political debate to steer the argument back in one's favor by declaring your opponent's position to be that of Adolf Hitler.

Two points from the above:

1. This debate is political and not about the science, and
   
2. The alarmists' position has become so untenable and their predictions so at odds with the observed data, that they will take any means to stifle any form of real debate on the science. They may have reached the point of desperation where they feel it necessary to play the Hitler Card.

This may be a tipping point indeed, but not of the type described by Hansen. It may be a tipping point in the debate over anthropogenic global warming.

Rex defends free speech in Canada

Rex Murphy muses about what might happen if Canada's Human Rights Commissions become too preoccupied with their persecutions of Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn...

Mostly I fear, if the HRCs are tied up, Canadians will be reading, unguided, what they choose to read, deciding for themselves what they like and what they don't, will discard a book or pass it to a friend, like a column or curse one - lit only by the light of their own reason.The horror! Before we know it, we'll have an unstoppable epidemic of free speech, free thought, and freedom of the press. And, surely, no one wants that. Otherwise, why would we have human rights commissions?

Via Mark Steyn.

Related:

Rex Murphy

from the CBC's The National of April 27th: