Categories for Musings

Comments (28)

Or my web site is, apparently. 

Many folks reporting they are getting virus warnings when they click on wwe.warrenkinsella.com. 

We had stripped out 100 lines of malicious code a couple days ago. It looks like they’ve crept back in. 

My apologies for the inconvenience. We are working quickly to fix. 

Comments (1)

Comments (0)

And, apparently, it’s now seen as a cure for other maladies by our elected representatives.  My quick reaction to that well-meaning but – sorry – fatally-flawed report by Parliamentarians yesterday:

At 15, you can’t ask someone to preside over your marriage. But you can ask them to end your life? #cdnpoli https://t.co/fi0e2lPG6r

— Warren Kinsella (@kinsellawarren) February 26, 2016

There are myriad problems associated with the report, which I assume is why Canada’s impressive new Minister of Justice was so cautious in her response. Said she, properly: “We’re looking to ensure that we continue to take an empathetic approach, that we look to create balance in our approach that recognizes the autonomy of individuals, that recognizes the need to protect the vulnerable, that respects the conscience rights of medical practitioners, and that will take a little bit of time.”

It shouldn’t be necessary for me to say this, but I will: I don’t come to this difficult issue as a Roman Catholic. I approach it as a pro-choice progressive, and as the son of a physician who won the Order of Canada, in part, because of his work on the ethicality of euthanasia. As our Dad used to say to us around the kitchen table: “Doctors go to medical school to learn how to save lives, not end them. A whole new category of professionals will need to be trained and certified to euthanize people. And who will decide what is ‘terminal’?”

Therein lies the rub. Euthanasia for the “terminally ill” is dangerous, I think, because we don’t actually possess a working a definition of “terminal.” Jack Kevorkian, the “Dr. Death” who killed dozens of Americans until his own (perhaps timely) passing, defined terminal as “any disease that curtails life even for a day.”

Even a day? In the pro-death crowd, that’s actually considered conservative. The co-founder of the Hemlock Society defines it as “terminal old age.” Others declare a person terminal when death will occur in a “relatively short time.”

Given that we all start to die the moment we are born, you can perhaps see the problem here. One man’s terminal is another man’s weeks, or months, or years.

As a liberal, I have another problem with terminating those who are “terminal.” The overriding theme in every discussion of health care, nowadays, is cost. Politicians and bureaucrats — conservative ones in particular — are always obsessively looking for ways to contain health-care expenditures.

So, for example, after the passage of Oregon’s Measure 16 — which similarly legalized the oxymoronic “assisted suicide” — the state’s leading health bureaucrat declared such measures would be paid for as “comfort care” under the Oregon Health Plan. Which, coincidentally enough, provides medical coverage for hundreds of thousands of Oregonians who are poor.

Months later, Oregon then announced plans to cut back on health-care coverage for poor citizens. Killing off the sickly poor? Robustly funded. Helping them actually get better? Not so much.

Students of history will recall, here, that euthanasia – literally, “good death” – was the NSDAP’s first program of mass murder. It predated the Holocaust by a decade, in fact. The Nazis declared that their benign objective was eliminating “life unworthy of life.” That is, easing the mortal burden of Germans who had severe psychiatric, neurological, or physical disabilities – and who were similarly a financial burden on German society and the Nazi state. People liked it, at first.

And, before you are moved to quote Godwin’s Law to me, don’t.  Just don’t.

Because, you know, this and this.

Comments (21)

Seems someone didn’t get the memo, en français, that he is “no longer with the Government of Canada.” Or something.

Comments (11)

From my column therein:

“In his most recent issue [of Your Ward News], Sears published a photo of Jesus Christ seemingly preparing to sodomize a naked woman clutching a crucifix. In the same issue, he likens Christ to Hitler, and approvingly writes: “Hitler saw his own campaign against the Jews as a Christian fight for truth and justice.” He entreats people to join his political movement, and “the war to expel the parasite,” by which he means Jews. He calls 9/11 a “lie” perpetrated by “ZioMarxists.” Oh, and he publishes one extraordinary glorification of misogyny and anti-Semitism beneath the headline: “THE LIBERAL PARTY’S MARXIST KOOL-AID IS SPIKED WITH SOPHIE TRUDEAU’S MENSTRUAL BLOOD.” That’s a quote.

For months, some of us – including our riding’s hard-working Liberal MP, Nate Erskine-Smith – have been attempting to get Judy Foote’s attention about all this, to no avail. Personally, I have contacted her “director of operations” on multiple occasions to try and get them – among other things – to stop Canada Post’s willful promotion of hate and Holocaust denial. No response (until this week, that is, when I finally got fed up and tweeted that Foote was ultimately responsible for James Sears’ willing business partner, Canada Post – and he finally replied, tersely acknowledging my objection: “Yes. On Twitter. Thanks.” That’s it.)”

I voted Liberal, folks, but I’m not going to put up with this bullshit any longer. I’m not alone, either.

Comments (8)

In other news, @realDonaldTrump makes @stephenharper resemble a latte-sipping, Volvo-driving, One World Government black helicopter Satanist

— Warren Kinsella (@kinsellawarren) February 24, 2016

Comments (43)

That was one of his jokes at the unveiling of his official portrait at Queens Park last night, and it was a good one. He was the same old Dalton: folksy, funny, familiar. I miss him.

It was weird – and bittersweet – running into old political friends at the event. For a decade, we spent almost every day together, going through assorted triumphs and failures. And then, quite suddenly, you just don’t see each other anymore. Life goes on.

A decade in power is a pretty good record, and it was good run. After that long, though, it was time for an entirely new crew, and that is what is there now. Most of us McGuinty central campaign folks are now not involved – not in any way, shape or form.  That’s as it should be.

Anyway – enough nostalgia. Here is his portrait, which I thought was pretty good. That light you see? It’s there because Dalton McGuinty has an inner light that can never be contained.

Comments (3)

You have to read what our friend Caryn Lieberman has reported today from that courtroom. It’s very hard to read, be forewarned.

(Apologies I could not make Storify work. For self-hosted WordPress sites like mine, it doesn’t.)

Comments (28)

This morning, as I surveyed the headlines – particularly this one – I felt a twinge of sympathy for the Minister of Finance.  Nobody else did, apparently.

Called upon to defend a platform promise he almost certainly did not write. Excoriated by articulate strangers. Welcome to politics, Bay Street guy, etc. etc.

Anyway, it all raises a question: does it matter? Do Joe and Jane Frontporch – standing at a bus stop, hunched against the cold, contemplating how non-existent their RRSP contribution will be (again) this year, reflecting on that Florida March Break holiday that will never happen (again) – really care about a $50 billion deficit? Does it matter, to them?

I don’t know the answer, but that (naturally) doesn’t stop experts from expertly dissecting the issue.  To me, it comes down to this: will we be European about a massive deficit, and a ballooning debt? Or will we be Americans?

Quote:

“Concerns over the debt has become a troubling issue on both sides of the Atlantic. However, the politics surrounding it differs in the U.S. A median 81% of the publics in European countries regard the size of the national debt as a major threat to economic well-being; 71% of Americans share that view.

But the unease over the national debt is far more likely to be a partisan issue in the U.S. than it is in Europe. Europeans, whatever their political leanings, tend to see indebtedness the same way. The left-right divide in concern is five percentage points in Germany, four in France, and three in Britain. It is 20 points in the United States, with only 59% of liberals ranking debt as a major threat to the economy compared with 79% of conservatives.

While there is a clear and broad consensus in the U.S. about the importance of dealing with debt and deficit, that is where the clarity and consensus stops – undermined by the disconnect between the public’s stated desire for a smaller government delivering fewer services, and its resistance to spending cuts and, in other cases, tax increases.

By a margin of 52% to 39%, the largest in five years, Americans express a preference for smaller government as opposed to a larger government providing more services.”

So, where do you stand, Joe and Jane Frontporch?  Are you a crypto-American, and think the deficit/debt will sink Trudeau et al. in 2019?  Or are you a closeted European, and shrug?

 

Comments (35)