A modicum of common sense

The bloated HRM gets a haircut. Finally.

The province’s biggest municipality needs seven fewer councillors, a regulator has ruled.

The provincial Utility and Review Board rejected Halifax Regional Municipality’s application to keep the existing 23 councillors but change district boundaries. It said 16 councillors, plus the mayor, is the right size.

The board’s decision, released Wednesday morning, says that the municipality has a much lower number of constituents per councillor than other similar-sized cities in the country, and public opinion has favoured a smaller council.

And check out the tidy table provided by the ChronicleHerald. Good job URB.

There is no sharia-lite

Australians are beginning to understand the problem on their hands.

(Via)

Die, GR! Die!

At long last, the CPC will kill the long-gun registry.

The Conservative government will introduce legislation in the fall to scrap the long-gun registry, this time using its parliamentary majority to back it up.

In other news, many Quebeckers remain as deluded about the GR as ever.

Bruce Hicks, a political scientist at the University of Montreal, said the NDP’s large Quebec base is pushing the party to be firmer in its support for gun control.

He said support for gun control is higher in Quebec than in any other province, in part because two massacres — the Ecole Polytechnique and Dawson College shootings — occurred there.

“Now that their caucus is so overwhelmingly populated by Quebec members, I tend to think this will decide the issue for them,” Hicks said. “They have too much to lose by not being strong on the long-gun registry.”

Black youth riots in America

Arnold Ahlert with a clarion call for the United States and Canada. A more important article I have not read in some time.

On Memorial Day weekend, there were riots in Charlotte, Rochester, Nashville, Miami, Myrtle Beach and Boston. Last Friday, fighting broke out at Brighton Beach in New York City, where five people were shot and a young girl was killed. Flash mobs have been attacking people in Chicago on the streets and on public buses. The common thread? All of the mobs were black youths — and there’s been a concerted effort by the media to ignore that reality.

Toward what end? Sparing America from a having a real conversation about race? Here’s what the see-no-evil crowd doesn’t want to talk about: there’s a thug element in the black American community which has been glorified for years. The seed was planted during the Johnson administration, which spawned the Great Society and the massive expansion of the welfare state.

Despite all protestations to the contrary, that expansion destroyed the basic underpinning of any civilized society, namely the nuclear family. Nowhere has that destruction been more prevalent than in the black American community, which now boasts an out-of-wedlock birthrate of 72 percent.

It’s not as if no one saw it coming. Daniel Patrick Moynihan predicted that America would pay profound consequences for “defining deviancy down,” specifically citing the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program as the prime culprit. Before the advent of the Great Society, AFDC had been reserved for widows, as a means of funding once-married women who had lost the primary male supporter of the family. In the 1960s, president Johnson and Congress changed the qualifications: any household where there was no male family head present became eligible for taxpayer subsidies.

Moynihan knew exactly where this was leading as far back as 1966: ”From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles,” he wrote, ”there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: a community that allows large numbers of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future–that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder…are not only to be expected, they are very near to inevitable. And they are richly deserved.” [...]

Why can’t we eliminate poverty? Because the progressive approach is one which completely misunderstands the human condition, positing that a lack of financial wherewithal is the disease. It’s not. It’s a symptom of the disease. The disease is a toxic mentality that leads to one horrendous life choice after another, highlighted by the choice to have children out of wedlock, followed by a father’s choice to abandon his own children as casually as one would toss away yesterday’s newspaper — even as the society at large, courtesy of progressive infatuation with “flexible” morality, has eliminated the shame that ought to attach itself to such irresponsibility.

Throw a little white guilt into the mix, perpetrated by the same white progressives who believe personal responsibility is a bridge too far for the “benighted classes,” and couple it with the black racial hucksters who egg the guilty on for personal aggrandizement and financial gain. The perfect storm of social dystopia continues unabated.

Toronto, anyone?