Gods of the Copybook Headings

Friday Night - The Prisoner

Workers of the World! Cease to Wash

I always knew socialists were low down dirty...

It’s official: baths and jacuzzis are anti-socialist. Not for nothing do their opponents describe the proletariat as the great unwashed. That worthy heir to Kadar and Ulbricht, successor to the great Fidel as liberator of Latin America, Hugo Chavez the President of Venezuela has written a new chapter in the Marxist canon. Henceforth, nobody is to sing in the bath or the shower, since it is a distraction from the basic business of washing, and no more than three minutes is to be spent in the shower.

Just in case you think old Warner is joking.

Scenes from the Imperial Capital

A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing

The above is my one sentence explanation of why I have little time for political science:

What remains, though, is a nagging concern that the field is not producing work that matters. “The danger is that political science is moving in the direction of saying more and more about less and less,” said Joseph Nye, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, whose work has been particularly influential among American policy makers. “There are parts of the academy which, in the effort to be scientific, feel we should stay away from policy,” Mr. Nye said, that “it interferes with the science.”

In his view statistical techniques too often determine what kind of research political scientists do, pushing them further into narrow specializations cut off from real-world concerns. The motivation to be precise, Mr. Nye warned, has overtaken the impulse to be relevant.

The numerologists that dominate the social sciences labour under a delusion, the delusion that the methods of the physical sciences can be applied to the humanities and social sciences. While mathematics is a powerful tool in economics, where relatively objective quantitive data abounds, as it drifts into sociology and political science its value lessens dramatically. Human beings have free will and act from enormously complex motives. People's explanations for why they act are often false, even when they are not trying to be deceitful. Ludwig von Mises, who was perhaps too hostile to quantitative methods in economics, struck upon this problems six decades ago when writing Human Action. 

O, New Brunswick

It's not that I believe governments should be in the business of educating the young. It's not that I believe that government has any business promoting citizenship. It's that I find it galling that some people have such a problem with the national anthem. Personally I prefer the Maple Forever, but O, Canada is alright. Unless you're not too keen on the whole Canada part.

Dozens of francophone schools in New Brunswick have applied for an exemption to O Canada after the province's education department mandated that schools that did not want to play the national anthem each day develop other activities to promote patriotism.

[…]

New Brunswick has nine anglophone districts, and five that are francophone. The National Post reached all but one francophone district yesterday, and all reported that some schools had applied for the exemption. Reports out of New Brunswick suggest there are about 40 in total, and the department is not aware of any anglophone schools opting out.

One of those wacky coincidences we're not suppose to talk about.

Government: Saving us from the Horrors of the Farmers' Market

So how's that "conservative" thing working out for you, eh?

The federal Competition Bureau has served notice to the Ottawa Farmers' Market that any informal agreements to set prices could violate Canada's new and tougher price-fixing law next March.

The Oct. 7 letter from John Pecman, the bureau's acting senior deputy commissioner, to market vendors comes after the Citizen reported on Sept. 27 that some farmers charge more for their fresh produce at the Lansdowne market than at other markets where they also have stalls.

Gerry Rochon, a farmer from Edwards who is vice-president of the Ottawa Farmers' Market, said some vendors used to have "friendly discussions" among themselves to agree on prices -- but those days are over as a result of the Competition Bureau warning.

[...]

However, next March the law will make it a criminal offence for competitors, or potential competitors, to agree or arrange to fix prices, allocate markets or restrict output, and such agreements will be illegal whether or not they actually injure competition.

Ezra Quote of the Day

"Ezra referred to himself as a "One man stimulus programme for lawyers and bureaucrats."

As seen in Sobering Thoughts 

Thursday Night - Becket

Check Your Premises

Ah, The New York Times. 

In fact, any editor certainly would cut the Bible, if an agent submitted it as a new work of fiction. But Cerf offered Rand an alternative: if she gave up 7 cents per copy in royalties, she could have the extra paper needed to print Galt’s oration. That she agreed is a sign of the great contradiction that haunts her writing and especially her life. Politically, Rand was committed to the idea that capitalism is the best form of social organization invented or conceivable. This was, perhaps, an understandable reaction against her childhood experience of Communism. 

[...]

Yet while Rand took to wearing a dollar-sign pin to advertise her love of capitalism, Heller makes clear that the author had no real affection for dollars themselves. Giving up her royalties to preserve her vision is something that no genuine capitalist, and few popular novelists, would have done. It is the act of an intellectual, of someone who believes that ideas matter more than lucre. In fact, as Heller shows, Rand had no more reverence for the actual businessmen she met than most intellectuals do. The problem was that, according to her own theories, the executives were supposed to be as creative and admirable as any artist or thinker. They were part of the fraternity of the gifted, whose strike, in “Atlas Shrugged,” brings the world to its knees.

Capitalism, in the sense she explained repeatedly, was not simply an economic system, but a socio-economic system that recognized individual rights. Had she employed the more generic term "free society," it would have failed to capture her argument. Back in the 1950s the free market was under sustained assault by the government and intellectual classes. The battleground for freedom was being fought in economics. Thus her use of the term capitalism. 

Rand had a keen seen of drama, read her books, the display of a gold dollar sign was a statement of defiance to contemporary morality and politics. She was not a narrow materialist seeking to make a quick buck. She was an artist and intellectual seeking to express her view of the world, like all artists and intellectuals. Monetary gain was nice, but it was a secondary motive. That fact that you believe sometime is a positive value, does not mean you have to dedicate your life to pursuing it. Old Publius thinks engineering and medicine are very good things, but I've no interest in becoming an engineer or doctor. It also doesn't mean I think all doctors and engineers are upright, decent people I'd like to know as friends. To assume otherwise, as the author of the piece does above, is to read Rand and her life at an extremely superficial level.

Scenes from the Imperial Capital

First Moncton, Then the World

Quot'd points to 1920s and 1930s era Canadian and American defense plans, in case either of us decided to invade the other.

The main zones of operation discussed in the plan are:

Nova Scotia and New Brunswick:

Occupying Halifax, following a poison gas first strike, would deny the British a major naval base and cut links between Britain and Canada.

The plan considers several land and sea options for the attack and concludes that a landing at St. Margarets Bay, a then undeveloped bay near Halifax, would be superior to a direct assault on the longer overland route.

Failing to take Halifax, the U.S. could occupy New Brunswick by land cut Nova Scotia off from the rest of Canada at the key railway junction at Moncton.

Imagine, Moncton might have been the key to the British Empire. Though how American politicians would have explained to the public invading a country one-tenth their size, with an army smaller than the New York City Police force, is not explained. Images of anti-war protesters flooding the Mall in Washington with signs reading: "No Blood for Maple Syrup!" or "Coolidge=Kaiser" or "Make Hockey Not War."

The rationale for the plan was that Japan and Britain were allies. In event of war between the United States and Japan, Britain would be at war with America. It's highly unlikely Britain would have risked war with America over the Japanese alliance. It's even less likely the Canadian government would have allowed itself be dragged into an incredibly stupid war. The Canadian defense plan was even more outlandish, we would have launched a surprise invasion of the northern United States. 

Wednesday Night - 2001

Tearing Down the Wall

Bush I, Kohl and Gorby met again:

Kohl, 79, who went on to become the first chancellor of a reunited Germany, appeared the most visibly moved by the moment, recalling the heady days that led up to the Nov. 9, 1989, collapse of the wall and Washington's and Moscow's willingness to let it fall.

"We achieved reunification together, with peace and freedom and with the support of our neighbours," Kohl recalled.

"We don't have many reasons in our history to be proud," Kohl said. "But those years when I was chancellor, ... I have every reason to be proud. I have nothing better, nothing to be more proud of than German reunification."

Proving that you can take the General Secretary out of communism, but not the communist out of the General Secretary.

"America also needs a perestroika," Gorbachev said, noting the push for change with the election of U.S. President Barack Obama. "A lot will now depend on America.... Leadership will have to be proven."

Scenes from the Imperial Capital

She's Everywhere!

I've never seen so many mentions of Ayn Rand in the media! She's sweeping the country! Of course, the media, being leftist for the most part, is indignant. The below article from Slate is just too amusing. The hatred really leaps off the page. The cheap shots and innuendoes. Usually only a living figure, like Rush Limbaugh, gets this kind of treatment. How does a woman, who has been dead for twenty-seven years generate such vitriol? Because of her uncanny ability to strike just the right nerve. Not bad for a "third-rate philosopher" and "mediocre" novelist:

Ayn Rand is one of America's great mysteries. She was an amphetamine-addicted author of sub-Dan Brown potboilers, who in her spare time wrote lavish torrents of praise for serial killers and the Bernie Madoff-style embezzlers of her day. She opposed democracy on the grounds that "the masses"—her readers—were "lice" and "parasites" who scarcely deserved to live. Yet she remains one of the most popular writers in the United States, still selling 800,000 books a year from beyond the grave. She regularly tops any list of books that Americans say have most influenced them. Since the great crash of 2008, her writing has had another Benzedrine rush, as Rush Limbaugh hails her as a prophetess. With her assertions that government is "evil" and selfishness is "the only virtue," she is the patron saint of the tea-partiers and the death panel doomsters. So how did this little Russian bomb of pure immorality in a black wig become an American icon?

For the Objectivists in the audience, don't get all hot and bothered. This is the MSM's way of paying her a compliment.

Conservative Government Acts Conservatively

I'll put aside my cynicism for the moment. Maybe, just maybe the government is doing this for the right reasons. Whatever the motive, this is a small but significant blow for freedom:

A Conservative MP says she's close to having enough opposition support to kill the long-gun registry in a vote on her private member's bill Wednesday. Candice Hoeppner says she has commitments from eight Liberal and NDP MPs to vote in favour of legislation that would end the decade-old registry and destroy existing data in the system on about seven million shotguns and rifles. 

 "I probably have eight (opposition) members who have indicated they'd support the bill," the Manitoba MP said Tuesday. "I would like to have 12 to really make sure it passes." A parliamentary vote in favour of Bill C-391 on second reading Wednesday won't make it law, but will send it to the next stage of legislative approval and make it that much more difficult to derail at a later stage. 

 Repealing the long-gun registry would still leave registration of hand guns and restricted weapons intact, and rifle and shotgun owners would still require gun licences.

Black Eye

There's an epidemic in Ontario. And it's not swine flu.

Illegal marijuana cultivation has reached epidemic proportions in Ontario and justice officials in the United States have branded their northern neighbour a "source country," the province's top police official said yesterday.

Marijuana is exported south and traded for crystal meth and crack cocaine, which are then brought back into Canada, OPP Commissioner Julian Fantino said.

"The going terminology is 'brown south, white north,' " he said, adding marijuana is also being exchanged for guns.

"It's a black eye on Canada when you have the United States ... refer to us as a source country of marijuana."

Investigating and shutting down marijuana grow-ops make up 60% of the workload of the force's drug enforcement unit, OPP Insp. Brian Martin said.

"60%" for a harmless weed. Well, that's not how the Commish sees it:

"(Marijuana) is the precursor, if you will, to so much of the violence and other activities ... that end up victimizing the most vulnerable communities," he said.

I wonder if anti-drug fanatics are conscious of channelling 1930s PSAs. Or that the arguments against cannabis are essentially the same as those that lead to the Volstead amendment. The difference, of course, is that middle class people find cannabis repugnant. 

Tuesday Night - Rand and Wallace

Thinking of the Children

Dalton solves a problem.

Full-day kindergarten has a few noisy advocates in the education research community, and, no doubt, near-universal support from working parents (or prospective parents) of children below kindergarten age. The specific question few are asking right now is whether there is any meaningful developmental difference between full-day and halfday kindergarten; in other words, whether this policy is likely to actually deliver any social benefit in exchange for the staggering, probably permanent cost to taxpayers. Or will it simply socialize the cost of child-care that working parents now pay to day-care centres and private nannies.

For parents lucky enough to have relatives to baby-sit, it's a non-issue. For those forced to rely on daycare and nannies (for the rich) it's a gift from the heavens, or more accurately a bribe from their friendly neighbourhood statist. Much easier to keep the kids in one location during the workday. This is another one of those "problems" created by government and "solved" by more government. One of the main reasons mothers of young children work is financial need. Thanks to punishing marginal tax rates on the middle class. It was a mere two generations ago that one parent could provide a decent lifestyle for a family of four. If the Dalt was truly concerned about his legacy he might consider cutting taxes, allowing parents to raise their own children rather than unionized government employees. The federal Liberals lost their bid for universal childcare in 2006. The Dalt has succeeded where they failed, through the backdoor of full day kindergarten. 

Scenes from the Imperial Capital

In Darkest America

Christopher Hitchens debates God in America:

I haven't yet run into an argument that has made me want to change my mind. After all, a believing religious person, however brilliant or however good in debate, is compelled to stick fairly closely to a "script" that is known in advance, and known to me, too. However, I have discovered that the so-called Christian right is much less monolithic, and very much more polite and hospitable, than I would once have thought, or than most liberals believe. I haven't been asked to Bob Jones University yet, but I have been invited to Jerry Falwell's old Liberty University campus in Virginia, even though we haven't yet agreed on the terms.

Wilson isn't one of those evasive Christians who mumble apologetically about how some of the Bible stories are really just "metaphors." He is willing to maintain very staunchly that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and that his sacrifice redeems our state of sin, which in turn is the outcome of our rebellion against God. He doesn't waffle when asked why God allows so much evil and suffering—of course he "allows" it since it is the inescapable state of rebellious sinners. I much prefer this sincerity to the vague and Python-esque witterings of the interfaith and ecumenical groups who barely respect their own traditions and who look upon faith as just another word for community organizing. (Incidentally, just when is President Barack Obama going to decide which church he attends?)

You'd think infidels, like me and Hitchens, would prefer the milquetoast Christians. Far from it. Debating mush is not much more fun than eating it. Hitch's real insight here, an insight to many fighters in the religious wars, is that the vast majority of American Christians are not ayatollahs in the making. They are basically decent people who don't completely believe the teachings of their church.  Take this bit from the article:

More to the point, though, you soon discover that many of those attending are not so sure about all the doctrines, either, just as you very swiftly find out that a vast number of Catholics don't truly believe more than about half of what their church instructs them to think.

Partly religion is a group identifier, especially for Catholics. For many Catholicism is what Judaism is to many secularized Jews, a cultural thing with about as much intellectual and spiritual significance as St Patrick's Day. Americans are not, on the whole, epistemologically religious. Events which contradict natural law - virgin births, carpenters walking on water - are laughable on the face of it. Only because they have been raised to regard religion as sacred, do they give a reluctant benefit of the doubt. When confronted with a blunt "you seriously believe this," they either back down or give hesitant affirmation. 

To get a real taste and feel for a genuinely mystical culture, look at the Miracle of Fatima. The mother of God never seems to make appearances in Time Square at rush-hour. It's usually in some deeply pious backwater among ill-educated peasants. Let's play what-if for a moment. Let's say three American children in 1917 had rushed home and told their mother they had seen the Virgin? They probably would have been smacked for blasphemy. This isn't just supposition. When Joseph Smith Jr, the founder of the Mormon Church, began announcing to people in upstate New York he had seen an angel, among other fantastic stories, he was quite literally run of town, several times. 

Americans are worldly enough to believe that the Age of Miracles has, in fact passed. The obsession with evolution obscures this. Yet just as many Catholics don't actually believe in many teachings of the church, so many creationists don't completely believe in Genesis. In some Christian circles it's a mark of unity to a subculture. Darwinian evolution isn't necessarily incompatible with a belief in God. Natural selection could be a manifestation of divine will. It is, however, obviously incompatible with Biblical literalism, which in America has always been a minority opinion among Christians. Evolution is a cultural landmark. Seized upon by secular Americans as a symbol of modernity in the wake of Scopes, the pious replied in kind. The debate about evolution has precious little to do with anything argued for in the Origin of Species. It's battle of world views by proxy. Trying to establish whose "founding myth" is correct, so to justify the rest of their cultural edifice. 

Monday NIght - Spoons

With Conservatives Like These.....

So why is Stephen Harper all chummy with Dalton McGuinty? Is that he recalls the old maxim that Ontarians vote for one party at the federal level, and another for Queen's Park? Or is it that he recognizes a fellow tax and spender?

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty and Prime Minister Stephen Harper are working hand-in-glove to gut the province's already hard hit, job-bleeding economy.

How? By simultaneously pursuing two policies that will have devastating consequences for Ontarians, continually raising both the price of goods and services and the taxes we pay on them.

Taken together, they will prolong and deepen the recession.

The first policy is McGuinty's decision to move to a 13% Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) on July 1, 2010, prompted by Harper giving him $4.3 billion of taxpayers' money to do it.

[…]

That's because it fails to take into account another policy McGuinty and Harper both support.

That is, creating a North American cap-and-trade market in carbon dioxide emissions, ostensibly to lower greenhouse gas emissions linked to global warming.

My guess is that Harper is using the cap-and-trade as protection for his political flank. See, even us evil Tories like the environment, except we want a "market" solution. Cap-and-trade is a pseudo market, created by government to trade government permits to pollute, all premised on faulty science. As with Harper's support for a free vote on same-sex marriage, it's a cynical ploy. With same-sex marriage he knew, the Tories holding a weak minority, that a free vote would fail to pass the bill. A law that would probably have been ruled unconstitutional anyway.

With cap-and-trade the Prime Minister can rest assured that a purely Canadian market would be pointless if the Americans didn't join. Thus his support for a North American "market." The Americans, however, even under Barack Obama are not going to establish a cap-and-trade system. The Democrats are using vast amounts of political capital to push their long cherished goal, a socialization of American health care. Whether it comes in stages, or all at once, is irrelevant. Whereas Blue Dog Democrats can go back to their districts and trumpet expanded health care coverage, they'll have a harder time selling cap-and-trade. A job killer, especially in key mid-western states, is never a vote winner, especially in a recession. Present sacrifices for some distant - alleged - gain make for poor stump speeches. It's not that it won't be close, the House has already passed its version of cap-and-trade. Still, it will be a long road before anything might reach the President's desk. Even if the bill passes, there will come bilateral negotiations to establish a North American market. Negotiations where Harper can scuttle a deal by playing the nationalist card. For all the Prime Minister's selling out of conservative values, he has no interest in becoming the architect of NEP II. 

Scenes from the Imperial Capital

Beaverado

"Attack it immediately." 

Churchill had asked for advice, he got it. The French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir was in danger of falling into German hands. On July 3rd, in an act as ruthless as it was necessary, Churchill ordered the destruction of the French Fleet. He is said to have wept on giving the order. His interlocutor was not so moved. The Minister of Aircraft Production had reasoned that the French fleet might be blackmailed by the Germans, perhaps by a threat to destroy Marseilles, into joining their weight to the Italian navy, tipping the balance against the Allies in the Mediterranean. The minister's strategic logic was sound. Churchill knew that. He had appointed him to cabinet over the howls of many members of his war-time coalition. In the vital summer of 1940 the RAF was desperately short of Spitfires and Hurricanes. Britain needed pilots and planes. The volunteers were not lacking, their tools were. 

A production miracle was needed, Churchill turned to Max Aitken, 1st Baron of Beaverbrook. Max was an old friend. He was also the most powerful press baron in the Empire. His Daily Express sold 3.7 million copies, the largest circulation of any paper in the world. He also had an uncanny knack for finance, making him, his associates and investors very rich. In four months he produced 6400 aircraft for the British war effort. Quadrupling the rate of production. His critics charged he was exaggerating the number of aircraft. Probably. Max had a tendency to do that. He had cut his teeth in the business world selling bonds door to door in rural New Brunswick. The hyper-active salesman never left him. He often went too far in making promises, in saying things he shouldn't. Yet what he did deliver was nothing short of brilliant. 

As part of a series of books on influential Canadians, under the guidance of former GG consort John Ralston Saul, the noted New Brunswick novelist David Adams Richards has produced a thin one volume biography of Lord Beaverbrook. Written in a chatty manner, that might be irritating to some, Richards provides what is really a longish personal essay, on arguably the most influential Canadian of the twentieth century. Another son of the Miramichi, Richards intersperses his chronological narrative with personal and family encounters with Beaverbrook. What emerges is a character somewhere between Horatio Alger and Duddy Kravitz, yet on a grand scale. A smooth operator with sharp elbows, always thinking several moves ahead of the opposition. 

It was said of his contemporary, TE Lawrence, that he had a habit of backing into the limelight. So did Max, except he would usually bump into some famous personage of the day, or soon to be, as well. He ran R.B. Bennett's first election campaign, while he was not yet of voting age. He promised voters things that R.B. couldn't, or wouldn't deliver, which did not amuse the future Prime Minister. Yet when Bennett moved west, and ran for Parliament, there was Max with his impish grin and fast moving 5ft 5in frame. You could never quite stay mad at him. No matter how many times he committed adultery, or bent the facts just a wee bit too much, he usually got away with it. Because he could charm, yes. Because he was often right, even when he was wrong, yes. Above all, because people needed Max. He was smarter than they were.

He talked his way into a job with the powerful financier John F Stairs, who put the bright young lad - just in his twenties - to merging a smaller bank to Stairs' Union Bank, then to running Royal Securities. Soon Max was in Montreal, the centre of Canadian Edwardian capitalism. The venerable Sir Sanford Fleming was in distress. His interests in concrete were threatening the pioneering engineer with bankruptcy and disgrace. Lead by the President of the Bank of Montreal, and assisted by the Who's Who that was then the board of the CPR, the great and good of Canadian business asked that Max Aitken figure something out. It was a trap. The fast rising Aitken was a threat, and one with a slippery reputation. The collapse of Fleming's interests in concrete seemed ordained. Best that the blame might be placed on the pushy cad from nowhere New Brunswick. Max had the last laugh. He saved Fleming's fortune, introduced a sweeping consolidation of the Canadian concrete industry - which had been crippled in the wake of the Panic of 1907 - and made his own fortune into the bargain. Yet the whole thing has been just a bit too slick. There were rumours. Max, now a millionaire (pounds not dollars) while not yet thirty, headed for the epicentre of power and finance, London.

Arriving with his beautiful wife - daughter of a Major-General - in England, he set up in great country estate - his neighbour and new friend was Rudyard Kipling. Marital bliss was fleeting. Richards argues that Beaverbrook was chasing love most of life, in the arms of this lovely and that, in the respect of a series of father figures. Among the most influential of the latter, was a fellow Canadian, Andrew Bonar Law.  A prominent Conservative, Law was engineered into the leadership of the party by Beaverbrook, a newly minted MP, in 1912. Aitken revered Law, deciding that his friend must become Prime Minister. The Liberals, under H.H. Asquith. were weak. An expected election in 1914 or 1915 would topple them. Sarajevo intervened. 

Another one of Aitken's new friends, Winston Churchill, had wanted an Liberal-Tory coalition to fight the war. The Liberals refused. Yet the government's popularity waned. Asquith was to be overthrown through a parliamentary coup in late 1916, among whose leading plotters was Aitken. Law was denied the premiership, instead made number two to another new friend of Max's, David Lloyd George. Though their politics were rarely compatible, they were both in a sense actors. Lloyd George, however, was a professional and Aitken just starting. Dropping hints of a cabinet position, as Minister of Trade, Lloyd George secured Aitken's support. 

In expectation of office, Aitken resigned his seat and started campaigning for re-election - as was required by British law at the time. Lloyd George, through Law, instructed Aitken not to run again, allowing the seat to go to "a Georgian" loyalist who would be made Minister of Trade. As consolation Aitken was raised to the peerage. According to legend, Kipling talked him out of becoming Lord Miramichi, on the grounds that Englishmen would be unable to pronounced it. The new Lord Beaverbrook had to console himself with PR work. First promoting the job Canadian soldiers were doing on the Western Front, then as Minister of Information in the war-time cabinet. Dreams of revenged never left him. From the end of the war in 1918 until 1922, Beaverbrook plotted again, to remove Lloyd George and replace him with Law. He succeeded only to have Law resign shortly after from throat cancer. 

In the midst of the intrigues surrounding Asquith's fall, Beaverbrook had acquired control of a failing paper called the Daily Express. Lord Northcliffe had told him he would lose his fortune keeping it afloat. Instead he revolutionized the industry. He introduced the first women's section and crossword. No expense was spared on photography and layout. The modern tabloid was born. As the paper grew in importance, Beaverbrook's reputation as a pushy cad never left him. The Establishment found his enthusiasm and energy aggravating. The mixture of envy and hatred that is directed from old money to new money. From self-made men to the scions of great names. Being a colonial didn't help. The British elite were not completely averse to outsiders, the Empire would never have lasted without the ruling classes talent for co-opting rising stars. Disraeli had been Prime Minister the year Beaverbrook was born. Dizzy, however, was a witty novelist and insanely charming dinner guest. The Maritime accent, and manners, hung too closely to the backwoods baron. 

They hated him, but they needed him. Nor was the hatred expressed in ordinary terms. That great worshipper of the upper classes, Evelyn Waugh, mocked his former employer as Lord Copper in Scoop. My own personal suspicion for years has been that Rex Mottram, the amoral materialist from Canada in Brideshead Revisited, was another dig at Beaverbrook. Isolated again, he sought out more women and more business ventures. The lure of politics remained. In a quixotic gesture he founded the short-lived Empire Party in 1930. Disgusted with the defeat of the Tories under Stanley Baldwin, who had succeed Law as leader and PM. Never an admirer of the famously pragmatic Baldwin, the Empire Party was a political blunt weapon to be used to take down Baldwinite Tories. The ideas was dropped, but not the party platform. Since coming to England, Beaverbrook had been a highly vocal advocate of Imperial Preference, a free trade zone within the Empire. This was a first step toward some kind of greater imperial unity, which he never defined. 

Imperial Preference faded, after a brief vogue during the Ottawa Conference of 1932. Like many middle aged men, Beaverbrook's world view had frozen in his youth. Then the idea of some kind of imperial federation was widely discussed in the first decade of the twentieth century. The idea of empire, however, was fading. The colonial boy made good found himself, so to speak, being more royalist than the king. The centre had no interest in holding. If his views didn't always carry the day in the councils of state, his dominance of the press was unquestioned. He almost single handedly kept news of Edward VIII's relationship to Wallace Simpson secret - in Britain - for much of 1936. Eventually the Daily Express did break the story, once it was clear Edward was set on abdication. If he couldn't prevent a constitutional crisis in the 1930s, he could at least give a platform to his old friend, Churchill, to warn of the gathering storm. Few in late 1930s Britain were interested in what Churchill had to say. The Times and the BBC effectively banned him for long stretches of time. When war came, and in time his appointment as PM, Churchill remember Beaverbrook's aid and comfort.

The post-war world proved disappointing to Beaverbrook. He had resigned from the cabinet in 1942 when Attlee was made Deputy PM. The age of socialism and decolonization was alien to Max. He made a few attempts to resettle in New Brunswick, but England was now his home. In all this he found time to write books. Richards describes his writing style as "Beaverado."So was his life. In his last public appearance, an interviewer asked him if he was disappointed in the ultimate failure of imperial preference. The old man replied quietly: "I was unworthy." Yet again he was exaggerating. Not from hubris, but undeserved humility. 

Friday Night - Waugh

Scenes from the Imperial Capital

I'm Old. Give Me Your Money.

The whiniest generation enters their golden years. Reach for your wallets folks. 

Canada's largest seniors' advocacy group has escalated its pension reform campaign with the release of a paper calling for a new, national pension plan to replace the Canada Pension Plan. A new public retirement savings plan that is "universally accessible, affordable, adequate and sustainable," is need to replace woefully inadequate CPP benefits, says CARP, formerly known as the Canadian Association of Retired People. 

 […] 

The position paper for a new universal plan contains few specifics. CARP says it could be a single national fund modelled on the CPP or a system of provincial and even regional funds. "The focus of debate should be on whether the various options would provide the level of robustness and sustainability that is critical to providing an adequate level of retirement security for all Canadians," says the paper. "The current economic crisis has focused public attention on the need for Canadians to prepare for their own retirement and on the absence of a universally accessible vehicle to do so effectively."

All of which is elaborate code for: We blew all our money, didn't save enough and we're asking our children and grandchildren to bail us out. On behalf of the young taxpayers of Canada: Cut down on your lattes, stop living off your credit cards and get out of my pockets. The word Canadian was once synonymous for rugged self reliance. That was before the Boomers took over. 

Just That Kind of Day

Soldiers. In Our Schools.

Quebec union and student groups don't like military recruiters (whatever the semantics) in high schools. Hmmm.

The Canadian military has no business recruiting in Quebec schools, argues a newly formed coalition made up of unions and student groups.

If the army wants to recruit, it should open recruitment centres and "leave schools alone," said Réjean Parent, head of the Centrale des syndicats du Québec (CSQ).

When it made its debut last month, the coalition called it worrisome to see the army in schools recruiting youths who aren't even 18 yet.

"We're not against a military career," said Xavier Lefebvre Boucher, head of the Fédération étudiante collégiale du Québec, which represents 21 CEGEP student associations in the province. "What we simply say is get out of our schools."

The article, oddly, doesn't explain exactly why this group opposes Canadian soldiers providing information to high school students. The most obvious answer is that the province's unions and students lean heavily toward separatism. A bout of service in Her Majesty's forces, meeting people from other parts of the country, might just spark federalist feelings among the Quebecois young. The province's traditional isolationism, which has blurred into a sort of pacifism since the Quiet Revolution, also plays a part. All that monarchial symbolism probably doesn't help.