http://subs.zinester.com/14807 The tri-weekly postings of David Warren - a political journalist for the Ottawa Citizen en http://archives.zinester.com/14807/158943.html?rss=1 COMMENTARY
May 14, 2008

Israel at 60

Will Israel last another 60 years? Will Canada? Will the West? I believe the
questions are closely related, and will begin by giving two quick answers.

The first is,  I don t know.  Attempts to predict the future from the
historical past have a track record around zero, and while it is true that
history is constantly repeating itself, it is able to repeat itself in many
different ways. On the present leadership performance of Israel s complacent,
incompetent, and probably corrupt prime minister -- and in view of the
assembling forces dedicated to the country s annihilation -- one might
reasonably say that Israel will be lucky to reach three score and ten. But as I
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May 11, 2008

Motherhood

I have it on reliable authority that today is Mother s Day -- to say nothing of
Pentecost -- and I hope to fit in a few words on that topic before my readers
all head out to join the nearest Marian procession in honour of Our Lady. Well,
perhaps not all my readers.

Still, perhaps, the best place to start: for I seem to have earned at least a
local reputation as some kind of Catholic religious nutjob, and I am rather
proud of it. We do need to start somewhere, for the very idea of  motherhood
has been so transformed through the last couple of generations -- during which
first divorce, then abortion, and then a lot of other things were turned from
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May 10, 2008

The Boris effect

While waiting through late March, April, and early May for the Zimbabwe
Electoral Commission to publish the results of the presidential vote in that
country, I noticed another election in progress. It was in London, England, and
there it was the mayor,  Red Ken  Livingstone, who had condescended to submit
to a public plebiscite.

My insinuation that Red Ken, now removed from office, was on a level with
Robert Mugabe, still not removed, is perhaps a little unfair. The chief
difference between them was opportunity. The scope for leftwing or  progressive
  political thuggery is much greater in a post-colonial country, such as former
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May 7, 2008

Newspapers

It wasn t the dinosaurs  fault the asteroid hit them.

Okay, let s back up a bit. I am alluding to an hypothesis, first advanced by
Luis Alvarez and son, that a large asteroid hit the earth, causing the mass
die-off of dinosaur and many other species, at what we used to call  the K-T
boundary  (the end of the Cretaceous geological period) about 65 million years
ago. This was proposed in 1980, and given apparent confirmation by the
discovery of traces of a huge impact crater in the Yucatan around 1990. It then
quickly became al-gorey  settled science  -- before being challenged with
increasing confidence from many different angles.
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May 4, 2008

Chilling out

For at least the next decade, we were told this week by the most august
scientific authorities, global average temperatures will not increase. My first
instinct, had I any free money to blow in, would be to bet that they will rise:
less from a betting impulse than from greed, for I ve noticed that a lot of
money has been made betting against the consensus of the authorities in my
lifetime, and a lot lost on assuming it was sound.

I might hesitate, however, in this instance, for from the little I know about
world climate -- enough to dismiss global warming alarmists, but not enough to
make my own confident predictions -- a cooling trend is more likely than a
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May 3, 2008

Reclaiming Canada

In my five weeks of absence from this space, I was saddened to learn, the
assault on free speech and the free press in Canada has been escalated. In
addition to the very ugly cases that have been brought before various so-called
 human rights commissions,  to silence such  politically incorrect  Canadian
writers as Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn, frivolous lawsuits have now been brought
against several prominent journalists and bloggers for their efforts in
exposing how the human rights commissions work, and for their audacity in
mocking ludicrous behaviour by members of the HRC s  Anti-Hate Teams.

Barbara Hall, the leftist former mayor of Toronto, who now presides over the
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April 30, 2008

Precariousness

Write each column as if it were your last. And sooner or later it will be,  an
editor once explained. I recall this sage advice, upon returning to my day job,
after annual leave. And with my first deadline falling smack on my 55th
birthday. (That is, yesterday. If you haven t sent a card, it is already too
late.) Five weeks of staying as far from the news as I could contrive to get.
Some of this time spent fighting curiosity.

But most of it caring for ancient parents, now shifted to a nursing home from
their need for constant medical supervision. This is a common experience among
baby-boomers, as my much younger, current editor explains: no call for  empathy
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March 23, 2008

Easter Sunday

For a lark, before writing this Easter Sunday column, I typed the single word
Easter  into an Internet search box, and looked for  news results.  Here, in
order, were the top five stories, as of midway through Holy Week, MMVIII:

Item, plastic Easter eggs, spinning tops, bunny hair clips, and  chick-style
sipper cups,  linked to lead paint by a Cleveland-area chemistry professor.
(And guess what? They were made in China.)

Item, motorists queue to beat Easter fuel price rises. (Various locations.)

... ]]> 155460 Mon, 24 Mar 2008 07:23:20 MSK http://archives.zinester.com/14807/155458.html?rss=1 COMMENTARY
March 22, 2008

Tibet

It is not necessary to have views on Tibet s claims to national independence,
to condemn the obscene Chinese Communist occupation of that land, and the
consistent policy of the butchers of Beijing to  Sinicize  or de-Tibetanize the
conquered territories. Since the Maoist invasion of 1949-51, Tibetans have
lived either under a reign of terror, or in exile. They watched the Communists
demolish their monasteries, and slaughter their monks, and purposefully
desecrate everything of beauty and value in the Tibetan Buddhist heritage.
Since, they have watched them appropriate the cultural space with forced
Chinese immigration, until by most accounts today the Tibetans are outnumbered
in their own country.
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March 12, 2008

Famine watch

A few weeks ago I wrote in this space -- facetiously -- that an effective
response to global warming and/or the atmospheric accumulation of carbon
dioxide would be to cut the world s food consumption by half. This could be
achieved if we would all agree to eat only on odd-numbered days.

Among the advantages of having our environmental commissars enforce this
scheme, I mentioned the halving of the factory and transport infrastructure,
that delivers the planet s food. But beyond this, the food industry s billion
or so poorest customers, who barely get enough to eat now, would be removed
from the carbon account entirely. Think of it on the analogy of a corporate
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March 9, 2008

Policy

The defence,  I was only following orders,  didn t work well at Nuremberg, and
hasn t worked well in courts where the rule of law is more securely grounded.
And yet, every large bureaucratic system depends on this defence, as a kind of
 unspoken mantra.

Can a mantra be unspoken? For the purposes of this column I will argue, Yes.
But the argument may strike any post-Christian reader as arcane.

It is my earnest belief that the human being is endowed with a conscience, an
innate understanding of right and wrong, and the ability, when that conscience
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March 8, 2008

Fighting FARC

Latin America has been, in the main, a mysterious blind spot in my
comprehension of the contemporary world, and remains so, despite advice
received from four different friends with some expertise in the region, who
tell me the solution to the problems my enemies have created for me in Canada
would be emigration to Brazil. (They are kind, and they are practical, but I
would not dream of giving anyone the pleasure of seeing the back of me.)

It is with this proviso that I comment on interesting developments in the
Spanish Main, where the democratically-elected, mostly constitutional, and
reasonably decent government of Colombia has been enjoying some success in
... ]]> 154557 Mon, 10 Mar 2008 04:48:46 MSK http://archives.zinester.com/14807/154274.html?rss=1 COMMENTARY
March 5, 2008

Eight months left

Given a choice not between a good and an evil, but rather only between two
evils, I m for choosing the lesser one. This has been my excuse for praying
that Hilary Clinton would somehow win the presidential nomination of the U.S.
Democrat Party. That accomplished, I could then turn my prayers to the benefit
of John McCain, in the hope he would defeat Mrs Clinton in November.

As a bonus, for a foreigner who is  conservative,  and thus tends to favour the
Popular Party in Spain, and the Republicans in the United States, I think Mrs
Clinton is the more defeatable Democrat candidate; and have noticed I am
supported by the polls in that.
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March 2, 2008

WFB

We lost this last week William F. Buckley, Jr., sesquipedalian novelist,
essayist, and pundit, magazine impresario, television host, yachtsman,
harpsichordist, sometime spy, bon vivant, libertarian conservative, Latin Mass
Catholic, widower, and sufferer from emphysema and diabetes, age 82.

Or as William Dunbar, the old Scots makar, wrote  quhen he wes sek :

On to the ded gois all Estatis, / Princis, Prelotis, and Potestatis, / Baith
riche and pur of al degre.

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February 27, 2008

Dark ages

One of the persistent themes of these columns, especially over the last couple
of years, might be abbreviated to,  Scientism versus Christianity.  It is a way
of looking at the postmodern revolution that has swept through all Western
societies in the last few decades. I say  postmodernism  because it is the
fulfilment of a much older  modernist  project, going back centuries: to
replace the authority of the Christian religion with some  enlightened  human
authority.

The paradox here is that the exponents of  enlightenment  have, wherever they
have come to power, brought regimes of unmitigated brutality, irrationality,
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February 23, 2008

Kosovo

Readers with exceptionally tenacious memories will recall that this pundit was
opposed to the NATO intervention in Kosovo, nine years ago. This may come as a
surprise to readers without tenacious memories, since it is widely believed
that I never saw a war I didn t like. Yet believe it or not, I was opposed not
only to the wanton bombing of Serbia, but also to the whole  inevitable
project of carving a new European Muslim state out of the flesh of that
Orthodox Christian country.

I was not without sympathy for the  plight of the Kosovars,  however. Like
virtually all journalists at that time, not of Serbian ethnicity, I fell for a
... ]]> 153503 Sat, 23 Feb 2008 07:46:38 MSK http://archives.zinester.com/14807/153237.html?rss=1 COMMENTARY
February 20, 2008

Blood moon

For those of an ominous disposition, there will be a blood red moon tonight.
The lunar eclipse will begin about 10 p.m., and continue for an hour, over
Ottawa. It will be visible across the night side of the planet: western Europe
and Africa, and the Americas. Adjust by time zone elsewhere.

If I have any readers on the earth-facing side of the moon, they will see a
spectacular solar eclipse, with the earth ringed in colours of sunrise and
sunset. For the earth-based, it is such colours reflected back to us that give
the moon its tinting tonight, and the astronomers are predicting an especially
deep red.
... ]]> 153237 Wed, 20 Feb 2008 07:46:24 MSK http://archives.zinester.com/14807/153236.html?rss=1 SUNDAY SPECTATOR
February 17, 2008

Witchcraft

It was twenty years ago -- I know this by the chance surfacing of some old
bloc-notes -- that I made a prediction about what would happen in twenty years.
I do not claim abnormal abilities in the prognostic art, and moreover, my
memory is also imperfect. For I cannot quite recall what inspired the
prediction. You know how it goes: you don t write things down in your notebook
that you don t think you could ever forget. Then twenty years happens.

So, on to my prediction. It was,  If x is happening now, in twenty years we ll
be having witchcraft trials.

... ]]> 153236 Wed, 20 Feb 2008 07:40:23 MSK http://archives.zinester.com/14807/153235.html?rss=1 COMMENTARY
February 16, 2008

Mad vanities

Which 88 percent of the economy would my reader most like to kiss goodbye?

I ask this question only as a practical matter, after reading the summary of a
Japanese study on the economic implications of the  global warming  fraud.
Noting the goal,  seriously  stated by the Group of Eight, to cut world CO2
emissions in half by the year 2050, a couple of techies at the Tokyo Institute
of Technology (Yasuaki Hijioka and Norichika Kanie) sat down with their
calculators, and coolly worked out what will be required to meet this goal, on
an equal per capita basis, around the planet.

... ]]> 153235 Wed, 20 Feb 2008 07:33:32 MSK