John Robson of the Ottawa Citizen wonders where the Mickster’s brains are at, and why we should even bother to care about winning a (temporary) seat on the UN Security Council:

One of the oddest stories of the week, which takes some doing, was Michael Ignatieff apparently trying to undermine Canada’s bid [more here, with video of prime miniser] for a UN Security Council seat. I know politics here doesn’t stop at the water’s edge but tries to shove the other fellow in. Still, this seems weird.

For the record, I’m not objecting because I want us to get a Security Council seat. As I subtly hinted in endorsing the suggestion back in 1999 that the UN be dismantled and hurled brick by brick into the river, I consider it a dangerous organization, less for the generally feeble things it does than for the illusions it fosters among well-meaning Westerners that there is some sort of world government committed to fair play and decency…

What he [Mr Ignatieff] said was “This is a government that for four years has basically ignored the United Nations and now is suddenly showing up saying, ‘Hey, put us on the council.’ Don’t mistake me. I know how important it is for Canada to get a seat on the Security Council but Canadians have to ask a tough question: Has this government earned that place? We’re not convinced it has.”

Where to start?..

I also do not know, when he says he doesn’t think we have earned such a seat, what behavior he thinks does qualify a nation for it. (The Council’s current non-permanent members are Austria, Bosnia and Herzogovina, Brazil, Gabon, Japan, Lebanon, Mexico, Nigeria, Turkey and Uganda. You tell me why.)..

Now listen to Mr Robson expatiating on the theme at CFRA Ottawa:

…

Friday, September 24, 2010
John Robson in the Morning- Sept 24
Madely in the Morning – 8:10am — Every Friday, John Robson, CFRA Commentator at Large, and Ottawa Citizen Columnist, joins Steve Madely for an hour to discuss the world’s news and his take on it. John also reveals his top 5 strange stories of the week!

Not enough Robson for you? Visit THEJohnRobson.com for more!
mp3 (click here to download)…

Meanwhile Norman Spector spots a smooth move by Bobbety:

UN chase shows that Grits got the wrong guy

…

Earlier:

Who cares if Canada gets a (non-permanent) seat on the UN Security Council?

Mark
Ottawa

Further to the Upperdate at this post,

Why we need F-35s, or, do the Russians have a radar that can reach Cold Lake?/Nuclear Voodoo Update thought/Boys in blue ties Upperdate

the government sure keeps trying to get those votes in Québec:

Deal keeps Mirabel firm aloft
$468-million accord with fees Contract to maintain CF-18 fighter jets would save 500 jobs, L-3 MAS says

L-3 MAS (Canada) Inc. of Mirabel pocketed a $468-million cheque from Prime Minister Stephen Harper yesterday for the last contract to maintain Canada’s aging fleet of 78 CF-18 fighter jets.

The deal runs to 2017, with possible extensions to 2020 that would add $86 million to the contract’s value and maintain 500 jobs at L-3 MAS’s Mirabel plant.

After the elaborate photo op and announcement ceremony -at which Harper answered briefly to only five questions -L-3 MAS president Sylvain Bedard told reporters that without the agreement, his company would have had to fire 500 employees…

But the bigger prize by far still eludes L-3 MAS, the Canadian subsidiary of New York City-based L-3 Communications, a major global provider of aircraft maintenance and modernization services.

That would be a deal to service the CF-18′s successor, the 65 Joint Strike Fighter CF-35s the federal government recently agreed to buy from Lockheed Martin for $9 billion. The maintenance and servicing clause of that deal is worth another $7 billion.

In a brief interview, National Defence Minister Peter Mackay said L-3 MAS “certainly has the inside track (to snag the CF-35 deal), especially after the job they’ve done (on the CF-18) all these years.”

“The great thing is that they would be in line not just for the 65 (CF-35s), but possibly for other armed forces as well. I mean, (Lockheed Martin) sold 3,000 of those things.”..

Via Spotlight on Military News and International Affairs.

I mean, those jet fuel fumes really are getting to poor Peter’s brain if he thinks other countries are going to give up their own pork to have their F-35s maintained in Canada Québec. And if he believes Lockheed Martin has actually sold 3,000 F-35s he’s truly in cloud cukoo land; he might do well to read this post:

Fighter sales prospects

Plus the “…F-35 fact check Update” here.

Update: More Conservative pork-o-mania here and here, via John Robson.  Dig the audio of his weekly Friday morning interview at CFRA Ottawa this morning, today on the nth resurrection of the Palestinian peace “process”, Iraq, Afstan, health care run by central planning–plus the federal government’s seeming insatiable propensity for pushing pork.  Mr Robson is a rare Canadian who can speak with real knowledge, fierce intelligence, and wicked wit.

Upperdate: I won’t link to this Ottawa Citizen story,

Russian planes don’t often fly into Canadian territory: Documents

since the only “expert” it quotes is St. Steve Staples.

Mark
Ottawa

Yesterday:

“Terrorism” update: Globe and Mail version/Toronto Star broad strata news

Today in the Globe it’s the fault of our war in Afstan, a PR exercise, and “fanciful teenagers”:

Terror plot would have brought Afghan war home to Canada
…
The Canadian citizens accused of belonging to an Ottawa terrorist cell allegedly planned to fund the purchase of weapons for Canada’s enemies in Afghanistan and had been trained to launch Afghan-style IED attacks in the Canadian capital. Had such a plot succeeded, it would have brought Canada’s Afghan war home with murderous effect….

A decade after the 9/11 attacks changed America and the world, the latest arrests will be held up as evidence that the threat of extremism is undiminished [emphasis added, it's in fact been said: '"Canada is not immune to terrorism," Public Safety Minister Vic Toews said from Winnipeg on Thursday. "We are not immune from international or home-grown radicalization."'].  Six years ago, officers stormed a suburban Ottawa house to arrest 24-year-old Momin Khawaja, unearthing a small arsenal of weapons and circuitry before successfully prosecuting him as a terrorist. Four years ago, police in Toronto raided homes of 18 young suspects, including a 20-year-old ringleader who videotaped himself testing a prototype bomb detonator.

Officials point out the latest accused are educated professionals clustered around 30 years old – and not, as in past busts, fanciful teenagers with violent fantasies [emphasis added, what about Mr Khawaja?]…

Such as this fantasist?

‘Toronto 18′ mastermind gets life sentence

Whatever the writers of the story are, they are not reporters. Then, in a truly broad strata editorial, the Globe manages never to mention the “I” word (nor, it must be noted, did minister Toews):

…
The question for Canada is how to protect against a threat that cannot be stereotyped, or fought by profiling based on age, appearance or education…

It is a nasty world in which one cannot trust a brother or sister, or a hockey-playing Canadian medical graduate who sings Avril Lavigne songs…

On the other hand a Toronto Star editorial, to give them credit, is not so stupidly politically correct:

…
Raised Muslim voices are a vital element in thwarting jihadist terror, along with good policing and vigilant courts.

Update: As for Afghanistan:

Afstan: “We have not even bothered to try”

Upperdate: John Robson on the arrests and their repercussions on CFRA Ottawa:

…
Friday, August 27, 2010
John Robson in the Morning- Aug 27
Madely in the Morning – 8:10am — Every Friday, John Robson, CFRA Commentator at Large, and Ottawa Citizen Columnist, joins Steve Madely (Mark Sutcliffe fills in) for an hour to discuss the world’s news and his take on it. John also reveals his top 5 strange stories of the week!

Not enough Robson for you? Visit THEJohnRobson.com for more!
mp3 (click here to download)
…

Mark
Ottawa

Hah!

What the Chinese really think of ‘Man Made Global Warming’

Low-income coal miners rest before starting their shift in a privately run coal mine close to You Fang Liang, Ningxia Province, north eastern China (Photo: EPA)

One of the great lies told us by our political leaders in order to persuade us to accept their swingeing and pointless green taxes and their economically suicidal, environmentally vandalistic wind-farm building programmes is that if we don’t do it China will. Apparently, just waiting to be grabbed out there are these glittering, golden prizes marked “Green jobs” and “Green technologies” – and if only we can get there before those scary, mysterious Chinese do, well, maybe the West will enjoy just a few more years of economic hegemony before the BRICs nations thwack us into the long grass.

This is, of course, utter nonsense. The Chinese do not remotely believe in the myth of Man-Made Global Warming nor in the efficacy of “alternative energy”. Why should they? It’s not as if there is any evidence for it. The only reason the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming myth has penetrated so deeply into Western culture is… No. I’m going to save that stuff for my fairly imminent (Nov?) book on the subject which I hope you’re all going to buy.

What do the Chinese think about CAGW? Well, until now it was largely a question of educated guesswork, based on inferences like the fact that it was the Chinese who derailed the Copenhagen negotiations [more--at The Guardian!]. But thanks to a new book called Low Carbon Plot by Gou Hongyang we know exactly what the official view is…

Via Arts & Letters Daily.  Meanwhile, the Ottawa Citizen’s John Robson despairs of Dauntless Dalton’s plans for the greening of Ontario–and of the electorate:

The latest inept and expensive flip-flop from the Ontario government, on overpriced rural solar power, has me scratching my head till my scalp hurts on a key question of political economy: Is it in fact possible to be a cunning dunce?

In case you missed it, the McGuinty Liberals just proposed a massive bounty for rural solar power and apparently (I am not making this up) didn’t realize people would come for it … in which case why offer it? Their “microFIT” program offered nearly 20 times the market price for solar-generated electricity, 80.2 cents per kilowatt hour (kW·h) rather than 4.02, to try to get people to put a few panels on their roof. To the government’s astonishment, a gold rush ensued instead.

By July 2, with almost 19,000 people lined up for the free money, the province said it would only pay 58.8 cents per kWh, provoking a wave of rural anger that Wednesday’s Citizen described as “so strong that it reportedly threatened the re-election chances of nearly two dozen Liberal MPPs.” So the government flapped the flip of its flop and will now pay 80.2 cents per kWh for every project registered before July 2 but only 60.4 afterward…

…they [Canadian politicians] think of the mass of humanity as reliably grateful for state benefits precisely because we are too inept to manage our own affairs rationally. Thus we respond to one incentive and one incentive only.

To paraphrase Orwell, it is precisely the sort of stupid thing only an intelligent person could believe. It is also insulting. But as long as we keep electing them, we are looking in the right place for cunning when we scrutinize our politicians, but in the wrong place for the dunces.

More from Mr Robson on our politicians buying our votes:

Pneus ABC Tires Inc: Your tax dollars at work…

Mark
Ottawa