By now I’m sure all of you have seen the whole Kony2012 campaign video that has gone viral over the past week. If not, here’s 30 minutes of your life you’ll never get back:

Watching this movie I felt the same helpless kind of pity for African children one always gets when reminded of the living hell that exists over there, as well as a sense of being emotionally manipulated to support a cause with my wallet. It reminded me a great deal of Greg Mortenson’s “Three Cups of Tea”, and we all know how that one ended.

Here’s Michael Petrou’s take:

None of this will make a scrap of difference in Central Africa. Joseph Kony needs a drone missile dropped on his perverted, evil ass. His child recruits need to be freed, protected, fed, and schooled. Donors who want to help need to give money to charities that specialize in that sort of work. No one needs Jason Russell’s novelty bracelets.

I agree with the conclusion here. Less 20-something social media activists running around American cities wallpapering bricks with placebo posters, and more drone strikes on warlords throughout the world.

If China were some irrelevant Middle Eastern country we use solely to jump into Afghanistan we might have a few choice words for the kind of human rights abuses and wanton subversion of democracy and liberty that marks a regular day in the communist country. But it isn’t, and we don’t. For the most part we shut up and thank them for stamping out our plastic trinkets and tell them to keep up the good work.

It’s a sham. Or as Terry Glavin puts it, “It’s a rigged game. Canada is an open society, with an open economy. China is neither.”

Fully half of China’s billion citizens subsist on sub-Saharan incomes of less than $2 a day, and they’re growing increasingly impatient with the corruption, oppression and persecution that has accompanied the stuffing of Beijing’s foreign-reserves treasury.
[...]
Last January, Beijing’s state-controlled China Investment Corporation rewarded Ottawa’s obsequiousness by choosing Toronto for its first overseas office. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty was so happy he nearly wet his trousers.
[...]
It’s gotten to the point that not a single politician in Ottawa will muster the impudence to wonder aloud whether, just maybe, this charade has gone on long enough.

The problem is that the global economy is largely dependent on continuing this charade for as long as possible, for while the eurozone remains Ground Zero in the debt crisis, China’s economic slowdown spells certain recession for the world in 2012.

So, we’ll have to hold our indignation just a while longer. Meanwhile, the United States will have to hope China doesn’t call in all that debt it’s been buying up over the past few years.

Because I work in news I tend not to want to listen to news on the way in to work, so I usually have the radio tuned to some rock or pop music station. But there’s only so long you can listen to Katy Perry before you go crazy, so I also switch to AM radio to try CKNW and CBC radio. The Current on CBC this morning featured an interesting war games scenario involving Israel and Iran.

The host, Jim Brown, discussed three scenarios to war with Iran to curtail their nuclear weapons program, and none of them sounded very appealing. Brown interviewed, Sam Gardiner, a retired U.S. Air Force Colonel, about the possible approaches to Iran’s regime. They were as follows:

1. Israel attacks Iran’s program preemptively with about 70 stealth bombers that would target identified locations, and then follow up with a special forces team that would set charges on underground facilities. The resulting fallout would likely draw the United States into supporting Israel internationally, while Iran retaliated against Israel with terrorist attacks and would inspire more fanaticism in the Middle East. The nuclear weapons program would likely be set back by five to 10 years.

2. The United States and Israel launch a coordinated attack involving bombing and special forces. No land invasion would occur and the entire operation would take place overnight. The fallout would likely be the same, says Gardiner.

3. Do nothing. Gardiner believes the Iranian threat is not existential to Israel, since he doesn’t think Iran would use the weapons on Israel without dooming itself to annihilation.

Listen to the segment. Which option do you support? Is there a fourth option?

I was having an argument on Twitter last night with a few American conservatives about the reasons for the apathetic 20-something generation who have swarmed the ranks of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Although I think we generally agreed that the main reason for the movement is that these self-entitled people are having, for perhaps the first time in several generations, to actually compete with other people for scarce jobs, we got hung up on why that is.

The Americans argued that success or failure in life determined solely by the individual, and that factors such as raw talent, education, or competition don’t really play a part. It’s difficult to argue the nuances of these points in 140 character updates, so I’m not surprised I was unable to sway their point of view. And besides, I understand that American conservatives have shifted toward a more individualist philosophy, and I don’t begrudge that point of view one bit.

Having said all that, I can speak from personal experience, and I believe that the reason the 35-and-under crowd are attracted to the Occupy Wall Street movement is that they’ve seen the level of competition out there, the job scarcity, the steepness of the ladder, and decided to cop out instead. Because, let’s face it, life is harder now than it’s ever been.

Don’t get me wrong. Yes, we have a socialist welfare state that enables dependence, and it’s certainly part of the apathy problem. In terms of the quality of life that our system offers, even the very poor have a relatively easy time of it as compared to their social equals in the developing world. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m saying that life is harder now for the young working generation of Canadians and Americans than it was for our boomer parents.

I can see many boomers shaking their heads, but there’s no point in denying it. The kids who grew up in the sixties had less educational requirements, a lower standard of literacy, a shorter trip in school, a larger job market to choose from, and more access to assets than today. A man could leave high school, find a stable and permanent job for 30 years, while supporting his wife and three or four children, two cars, vacations at the cottage, an affordable home, and a little bit of savings to sock away for retirement.

My stepmother is a perfect example. After finishing high school, she found a job as a school teacher at 19, and continued in this career until the age of 55, retiring comfortably on a teacher’s pension. I’m not saying her life was easy, by any stretch of the imagination, but becoming a school teacher at 19 really isn’t an option for today’s youth.

In fact, a single degree isn’t even really a guarantee of success these days. Children have to go to school longer and go deeper into their field of expertise to stand out from the crowd. On this issue I found strong opposition from the Americans, but I don’t understand why. Education is the single most effective means of lifting a person from poverty, and I’m actually a perfect example of that argument. Certainly I’m not saying all people require degrees, and there are always exceptional examples of that person you know who earned a million dollars before he was 25 after dropping out of school, but in general I’m right.

I’m not just asserting this fact either. All one needs to do is access any Statistics Canada or U.S. Census statistics, and you find that income is proportional to education in every single demographic. There are no exceptions to these statistics. For every buddy who dropped out of high school to become rich, the other 90 percent are living in poverty.

But getting more education isn’t the only problem. There’s now more competition out there, thanks to highly skilled immigrants. That means you need to stand out from the crowd somehow. It’s not good enough to show up to a job and be competent. Now you have to actually exceed expectations in a way your parents probably never experienced. For a lot of Canadians, this is a relatively new phenomenon. We’re used to small cities, ample space, burgeoning jobs markets and suddenly we’re finding urban sprawl, dense populations and increasingly impossible job markets to penetrate. Today’s young worker better expect to relocate from his or her birth city, if not the province.

Europeans, Americans and Canadians might be surprised by this brave new world, but the Asians have been doing it for generations. They’re not surprised by the level of competition because they’ve been trying to stand out from a talent pool of several billion people for decades now. There’s a reason Asian parents are particularly hard on their children and demand so much from them. And before anybody thinks I’m making the Macleans Magazine “Too Asian” argument, I’m simply stating the fact that this is a culture that has developed a survival instinct. We haven’t.

The self-entitled slackers who have found themselves up against a whole new level of competition, not just from hard-working Asian immigrants but also their domestic counterparts, aren’t ready to deal with it. They don’t feel like they should have to put in the very hard work necessary to succeed, so they find a convenient scapegoat. The one percent. It’s not my problem, it’s the corporations. It’s not my failure, it’s the greedy capitalists.

Yes, life is harder. Having children today just isn’t an affordable option, which helps to fuel the problem. Housing is quickly being priced out of the range of the middle class, and you certainly can’t buy it on Daddy’s salary anymore. Mommy has to work as well, which means there’s even less chance she’s having kids. You can forget about assets, investments, savings and vacations.

The scary thing is that while the Occupy Wall Street kids are out there protesting about how bad life sucks, the hard-working immigrants and their children who have come from countries with real problems are busy taking their place in the job market. And I don’t mean that it’s scary in a bad way. I just feel bad for these kids who don’t realize they’re putting themselves behind the rat race needlessly, which will only lead to greater difficulties in their thirties. Again, I know this from experience.

So, what’s to be done? Well, the wealth disparity and shrinking middle class is a topic too lengthy for this blog entry, but I do know that the western world had better start picking up the pieces quickly before it starts falling apart. Rome certainly wasn’t built in a day, but once it began crumbling it didn’t take long. There are always new countries and new empires ready to rise from the shadows.

Photo: Reuters/Stefan Wermuth

I’ve been reading about London’s week-long riots with sideways interest for a number of reasons. First, because, like Vancouver, they seem to have manifested on a flimsy pretext with no real unifying reason or cause. Second, because it seems to me a portent of things to come among this, the latest me generation of self-entitled youth.

The reason nobody can find a reason for the violence in London is simple: there isn’t one. Or at least nothing that would satisfy the question that the media has tried and failed miserably to answer. Oh certainly, there’s all the usual suspects: unemployment, capitalism, racism, police brutality, etc. The list is by no means a short one.

But there’s no real reason why the iPhone-wielding teenagers who have laid waste to London are breaking the law. They have no political or moral compass guiding them. On the contrary, it is a complete lack of either that seems to answer the best for their cretinous activities.

That’s not to say there is an absence of certain obvious socio-political symptoms behind the sickness afflicting the country. It, like most western countries over the past several decades, is realizing the consequences of nurturing and pandering to a social convention that nobody has to take personal responsibility for anything. It’s always somebody else’s fault: capitalism, racism, colonialism.

There’s also the obvious tensions from a people who feel they’ve lost their cultural identity — and I don’t just mean the Britons — thanks in large part to the Labour Party’s utterly reckless, yet deliberate plan to foist multiculturalism on the country through a veritable tsunami of immigration that, let’s face it, the economy nor the social order could safely absorb.

The racial tension in this post-racial black-president world is also evident, though it’s a little disturbing some people feel that black thugs exploiting the chaos by robbing thin-muscled white kids of their clothing is a redistribution of inherent wealth disparity. That’s the same numbskull mentality that has led to the present situation: blaming individual acts on historical injustices.

No, the riots in London have a much more banal explanation based on a mundane existence. It isn’t as though these people are like Afghans, Iranians or Syrians, people with real problems in countries beset by real political malfeasance. They’re just, for lack of a better term, bored.

Faced with an increasingly competitive job market, diminishing opportunities for employment with only a high school education, and the requirement to actually reach for and achieve something better in life, many of London’s young people have chosen instead to believe in a retrograde philosophy reserved for reprobates. Anarchy.

Anarchism is a philosophy that requires no core definition of principles, morality or responsibility. By this standard, a person looting a store, robbing a weaker teen of his Adidas, or hurling a brick through a glass window, can be deemed a political act and passed off as such to a media unaccustomed to scrutinizing motive.

Why would an otherwise ordinary, moderately well-educated and literate middle class British youth hurl a brick at a window in order to steal a pair of jeans inside? Is it the economy, the policies of government, or a social reflex to an unjust society? No to all.

Almost all philosophers accept that man is inherently good, and is the basis for liberal philosophy and civilization. But within each man exists the heart of darkness, the duality of nature that brings good and evil. Perhaps the most disturbing realization about evil is that much of it is banal and sterile and ordinary.

As William Golding’s Lord of the Flies demonstrates, evil does not exist on the surface, but lying ever underneath is the wretched opportunism of the ruthless. It takes but one brief lapse in the protection of social order before that exploitation is realized.

When I first heard there had been terrorist attacks in Norway on Friday morning I assumed what anybody else in a confessional state of mind would admit. I assumed dangerous, fanatical Muslims had gone and murdered innocent people in the name of their deity and some twisted sense of logic sustaining that murder.

But, having lived in the same century as the Oklahoma City bombing, I wasn’t willing to cast suspicions or speculation beyond that which my brain was involuntarily sharing with me in private. In fact, understanding that the vast majority of Islamic terrorist attacks actually occur within Muslim nations, I wasn’t altogether surprised when it was later revealed that al-Qaeda wasn’t behind the attacks at all, but merely a deranged psychopath who took out his frustration about the policies of his government on unarmed children.

When it was found out that the killer was not actually Muslim, there was almost a collective sigh of relief that swept through the internet’s left-leaning writers and tweeters, quickly followed by self-righteous remarks about people jumping to conclusions. Of course, the logical extension to that relief means that even our benefactors of the doubt had considered with grim concern what might have been said if the attacks were carried out by Islamic fanatics.

The possibility wouldn’t exactly have been precedent. It’s true that the majority of terrorist attacks in Europe have been carried out by indigenous separatist groups within the continent, such as the ETA in Basque or the more oft cited IRA in Northern Ireland. But the reason one’s reflexive assumptions jump to Muslim conclusions has less to do with their relative success in murdering innocent Europeans as it does with their prolific reputation for blowing up innocent people in general.

It’s absurd to ascribe a prejudicial bias to those who assumed the attack was carried out by Muslims. One doesn’t merely make assumptions about things without reason or historical basis. Let’s face it. The sorts of spectacular acts of dismembered carnage and blood-soaked mayhem etched most prominently in our brains came from reading news stories about Muslim suicide bombers on crowded buses or markets.

What this means is that there’s a valid reason for fear, if not prejudice, that the act had been carried out by ideological adherents of the more cult-like sects of Islam. It’s the same reason when you hear a dog mauled a person you assume it’s a pitbull, or when you hear a paedophile molested a child it’s a white middle-aged male. You could be wrong in either case, but your brain makes the unconscious association before the liberally progressive training you’ve received can object.

But what is striking about the discussion surrounding Anders Behring Breivik is the absence of Islamic terrorism’s role in the attacks. Because whether we’d like to admit it or not, the preceding spectacular attacks carried out by Muslim terrorists in other countries at different times in the past 10 years still have quite a bit to do with Breivik’s actions. And the most notable spectacular of them all was carried out nearly a decade ago in New York City.

Simply put, there is no justification or rationale for Breivik’s misguided insanity, turning on innocent children as a punishment for the “traitors” who sold Europe out to the Marxist-Islamists. But in order to understand the insane man’s perspective, the two groups he blames in his manifesto have to be addressed for the pink elephants in the phone booth they are.

European socialistic multiculturalism and decades of open immigration has created an undercurrent of resentment and a breeding ground for home-grown terrorists. To a person like Breivik, he may have seen Muslim immigration as a provocation and the government’s unwillingness to address it as an invitation to war.

But Breivik’s rampage would likely never have taken place if Islamic terrorism wasn’t so ubiquitous. If we didn’t need to breathe that sigh of relief that al-Qaeda didn’t attack Norway, the attack probably wouldn’t have happened at all, since dangerous fanatics in Central Asia wouldn’t have inspired a dangerous fanatic in Norway.

So, far from allaying the fears that this had nothing to do with Islam, it has only served to reinforce that terrorism has been an effective weapon of their zealots. We can only hope there aren’t very many other Breiviks roaming about under similar delusions.

IN THE TWITTERVERSE

#blamethemuslims is currently trending, but employed ironically, of course. It’s only one more example of the kind of non sequitur nonsense sure to pop up in the aftermath:

After all, we don’t require our tourists to register before they smoke B.C. Bud. I’m not quite sure what Holland is aiming for here. What reasons other than the red light district and pot brownies would one visit the country for?

The Dutch cabinet says it will push ahead with plans to force anyone wishing to purchase marijuana at the country’s weed cafes to first obtain an official pass — a move designed to curtail tourists from buying the drug.

Prime Minister Mark Rutte says he plans to begin rolling out the system in the country’s south later this year, an area popular with French and German buyers, before moving on to Amsterdam’s famed tourist cafes later in his term.

Tune in a year from now when Holland releases a tourism program begging people to come to their country for the windmills and below-sea-level ambience!

Mark Steyn sums up perfectly the dichotomy of U.S. power and incompetence in the assassination of the Osama bin Laden, pointing to superbly trained elite warriors dispatched by a government that, up until recently, seems to have had no inkling of Pakistan’s subterfuge:

Pakistan, our “ally,” hides and protects not only Osama but also Mullah Omar and Zawahiri, and does so secure in the knowledge that it will pay no price for its treachery – indeed, confident that its duplicitous military will continue to be funded by U.S. taxpayers.

Pakistan’s complicity in terrorism is the worst-kept secret on the planet, cowed as they were into collaboration with the Americans after 9/11 finally got the attention of the west. In those immediate months and years after the terrorist attack, the Middle East and Central Asia were all too aware that they’d gotten more attention than they would have liked. But following a detour into Baghdad, the collapse of cooperation between Pakistan and the United States has been as self-evident as the war effort across the border.

The dumping of bin Laden’s corpse into the ocean before using it as a propaganda weapon against America’s enemies was wasted. Steyn is mindful of history’s instructive examples. I mentioned MacBeth, but Britain’s revenge in Sudan in 1884 is also useful:

But, after Kitchener slaughtered the jihadists of the day at the Battle of Omdurman in 1897, he made a point of digging up their leader the Mahdi, chopping off his head and keeping it as a souvenir. The Sudanese got the message.

Indeed, far from dragging bin Laden’s porous cranium onto a stage and driving in onto a pike, the U.S. reportedly gave bin Laden a respectful funeral observing Muslim customs and traditions before his body was converted to fish food. And did this shallow appeasement of the Muslim world do anything more than serve as another excuse to hate America? Nay. In fact, it gave the liberally enlightened academics another excuse to blame the country for its own predicaments:

It’s increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition—except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them.

By the wording of Chomsky’s opening graph, you’d think bin Laden was busy drinking cups of Chai tea whilst planning the construction of girl’s schools in Waziristan. And rather than acknowledging the morally consistent use of a woman as a human shield by these fanatical Muslims, he chooses to focus on the fact she and her husband was shot, thereby denying the world the opportunity at giving the world’s most notorious bastard a fair trial under international law.

It is probably fitting bin Laden was killed in the heroic raid, for I have no doubt the Chomskys of the world would have given him full benefit of the doubt for his crimes, before leading the vociferous charge for a humanitarian stay of execution by intellectually massaging the moral conundrum of state-sanctioned murder. Thank God for Navy Seals.

The dubious reconciliation pact that has been signed between Fatah and Hamas, the latter purporting to be the governmental authority in the Gaza Strip whilst simultaneously carrying out acts of terrorism against Israel, is another step back in the road to an independent Palestinian state.

As James Kirchick writes in Hareetz, the “useful idiots” supporting this reunification genuinely consider themselves friends of the Palestinian cause, but are unable to detect their cognitively dissonant support for a paramilitary organization that decried the death of mass murderer Osama bin Laden.

As Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh told media this week, “we condemn the assassination…of an Arab holy warrior. We ask God to offer him mercy with the true believers and the martyrs.”

Bin Laden was a deranged, psychotic cult leader who carried out an act widely considered to be amongst the most heinously evil in contemporary human history. That he represented the idealistic image of a holy warrior for Palestine tells you all you really need to know about Hamas, or the potential for peace with this group of ragged rage-filled radicals.

Hamas is everything that self-professed liberals should be “prejudiced” toward: obscurantist, misogynistic, anti-Semitic, warlike and rejectionist. It calls for the death of homosexuals and bans dancing.

This is the paradoxically perplexing thing about the left’s devotion to the Palestinian cause. Hamas, and other religiously inspired fanatics in the Arab world like them, represent everything anathema to liberal sensibility. Those who openly mourned bin Laden’s long overdue date with the afterlife deserve the harshest sort of condemnation from the liberal-left usually reserved only for evangelical Christians.

But, as we all know, that sort of outrage is meted out to nice safe targets like Rob Ford and Don Cherry, racists both. The same useful idiots who hyperbolize our new majority government as the beginning of a George Bush-style Americanization of our country are deafeningly silent when it comes to criticizing a people who launch rockets from children’s schools and use women as human meat shields.

via — Terry Glavin