News

Supreme Court sides with Conservative Party against price-fixing monopoly

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Prime Minister Stephen Harper

Story here from the Vancouver Sun. (H/T Andrew)

Excerpt:

The Canadian Wheat Board cannot spend money on advocacy to protect its monopoly, following a Supreme Court of Canada decision Thursday against hearing an appeal from the Winnipeg-based agency, which asserts that it has been silenced by the Conservative government.

Without giving reasons, the high court declined the appeal application to a Federal Court of Appeal ruling that sided with the federal government in its 2006 order from then-agriculture minister Chuck Strahl for the board to refrain from spending its money on lobbying.

[…]The federal Conservatives are seeking to end the board’s monopoly, which is controlled by farmers. The monopoly makes the agency one of the world’s biggest exporters of wheat and barley.

The board maintains that the monopoly ensures farmers receive the best prices for their grain, but the federal government, along with some farmers, say that they would be better off in a free market, selling their products on their own.

Conservatives are for a free market and competition, because we believe that it is the best way for consumers to get a low price and high quality. The proper role of government is to ensure that no organization or business enjoys monopoly status due to the government insulating them from competition. The Canadian Wheat Board is just one option, but farmers should have other choices to sell their product.

Capitalism is opposed to monopolies and it is the proper role of government to make sure that no government policy is set up to favor one corporation over any competitor. Let the farmers choose what is best for them. Choice and competition.

Videos

MUST-SEE: Marc Thiessen defends water-boarding against Christiane Amanpour

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The debate spans two videos. (H/T Newsbusters via ECM)

Part 1:

Part 2:

The transcript is here.

Here is a good part:

THIESSEN: Excuse me, Philippe. I thought you said we’re not going to interrupt each other. Let me — it does. Let me tell you something. We – – we waterboarded in the CIA — the CIA waterboarded three terrorists, just three. Nobody waterboarded in Guantanamo. You know who else the U.S. government has waterboarded? Tens of thousands of American servicemembers during their SERE training.

We do not pull off their fingernails. We do not electrocute them with cattle prods. We do not pour hot oil down their nostrils or other forms of interrogation or do the things that were done to them in S-21. But we do waterboard them.

Do you not think, if waterboarding was torture, that one of those American servicemembers would have complained to his congressman, there would have been congressional hearings, and we would have — and it would have been banned by law? If we had been pulling off their fingernails, that would have happened.

And better still:

THIESSEN: But why would we give them Geneva Convention protections? They don’t merit Geneva Conventions protections. They’re terrorists.

The — the Geneva Conventions — this is one of the biggest myths about the Geneva Convention — it is not designed to govern the treatment of prisoners of war. It is designed to protect civilians, to get people to follow the laws of war. So if you give the same protections to someone who violates the laws of war as someone who follows them, you completely undermine the Geneva Conventions.

But the point is, these techniques, as applied by the CIA, produced intelligence that stopped a terrorist attack to blow up our consulate in Karachi, to blow up our Marine camp in Djibouti, to blow — for Al Qaida, who was — they were planning to hijack an airplane and fly it into Heathrow Airport and — and buildings in downtown London — I hope nowhere near your offices, Philippe — and they were planning to fly an airplane into Library Tower in — in — in Los Angeles.

So my question to Philippe is, which of these attacks would you prefer we hadn’t stopped?

This debate really shows the ignorance of national security issues on radically leftist propaganda networks like CNN. Facts are irrelevant to the left. They’re ignorant of the way the world really works, and their job is to act as an arm of leftist political parties. Republicans are grown-ups and Democrats are children. Children who are going to get us killed because they are dangerously unqualified to protect us from terrorist attacks. In 2010, we need to vote as many children as possible out of office.

Polemics

New book: James S. Spiegel’s “The Making of an Atheist”

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Warning: Atheist readers of the Wintery Knight blog are forbidden to read this post. I forbid you! Forbid!

Here’s the web site for the book. (H/T Cloud of Witnesses via Apologetics 315)

Excerpt:

Sigmund Freud famously dismissed belief in God as a psychological projection caused by wishful thinking. Today many of the “new atheists”—including Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens—make a similar claim, insisting that believers are delusional. Faith is a kind of cognitive disease, according to them. And they are doing all they can to rid the world of all religious belief and practice.

Christian apologists, from Dinesh D’Souza to Ravi Zacharias, have been quick to respond to the new atheists, revealing holes in their arguments and showing why theistic belief, and the Christian worldview in particular, is reasonable. In fact, the evidence for God is overwhelming, confirming the Apostle Paul’s point in Romans 1 that the reality of God is “clearly seen, being understood from what has been made so that men are without excuse” (Rom. 1:20, NIV).

So if the evidence for God is so plain to see, then why are there atheists? That is the question that prompted The Making of an Atheist. The answer I propose turns the tables on the new atheists, as I show that unbelief is a psychological projection, a cognitive disorder arising from willful resistance to the evidence for God. In short, it is atheists who are the delusional ones.

Unlike Dawkins and his ilk, I give an account as to how the delusion occurs, showing that atheistic rejection of God is precipitated by immoral indulgences, usually combined with some deep psychological disturbances, such as a broken relationship with one’s father. I also show how atheists suffer from what I call “paradigm-induced blindness,” as their worldview inhibits their ability to recognize the reality of God manifest in creation. These and other factors I discuss are among the various dimensions of sin’s corrupting influence on the mind.

Nothing makes the Wintery Knight happier than seeing the truth of Romans 1 come out in encounters with atheists. I love to understand how atheists come to their atheism. What I am reading about this new book makes me think that Dr. Spiegel and I will be in broad agreement – but I still must know the details. And you should know it too – understanding atheism helps Christians to understand why they should not cave in the pressure to water down doctrine, e.g. – annihilationism, inclusivism, etc.

By the way, has anyone read R.C. Sproul’s “If There is a God, Why Are There Atheists?“? I love that book. (No, I am not a Calvinist!) Christians need to get really comfortable with the reasons why people reject the Christian God in particular. This is the best book I’ve ever read on that topic. We really need to do a better job of calling atheists out on the real reasons for their unbelief. (Note: I never talk to individual atheists about their individual sins – just don’t do that ever! But their speculations and unbelief are fair game)

Just last week I was dealing with an atheist who was trying to tell me how fair and balanced Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart are. He also said that the Discovery Channel does a good job of exploring the historical Jesus, and that debates like the kind I recommend are woefully inadequate. One of my friends has a non-Christian father-in-law who is listening to Bart Ehrman lectures. I wonder if this father-in-law is open to watching Bart Ehrman defend his views in a formal debate? Probably not, and that’s my point.

There seems to be a whole boatload of busy people trying to twist the material world into some sort of lasting happiness apart from God and autonomous from the moral law. They do not want to bow the knee to Christ, which is the natural result of any honest investigation. Instead they deliberately look for speculations to keep the real, living God at a distance. We need to be courageous about pointing out the real reasons why they are pushing a fair investigation into these matters away with both hands.

Note, if you are an atheist and you read my blog and you’ve seen a William Lane Craig debate, then I don’t mean you. At least you were open-minded to some degree. But I’ll tell you right now, that’s only about 10% of the atheists I know. Atheists usually don’t know because they don’t want to know. That doesn’t mean I don’t love you, it just means you’re not being fair with your investigation of these matters and I’m going to call you out.

By the way, Jim and Amy Spiegel operate a blog called Wisdom and Folly. It looks good.

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