++ relapsed catholic ++ religion politics culture blog

FINAL POST: This blog has moved to a new home

2007-01-17T10:05:00.000-05:00

Change your bookmarks, etc. to RelapsedCatholic.com.

Our new host is Blogmatrix, founded by Toronto's own David Janes.

As of right now (Wednesday, Jan 17/07) the RSS feed at the new site is still being fixed, and we have a CSS/font size issue. But otherwise the site is 95% working, so please come visit!

PS: So long, Blogger. It's been a great 6.5 years but your "new" and "improved" platform is icky, and your help forum is worse. Bye.

URGENT: This blog is moving!

2007-01-16T14:39:00.000-05:00

UPDATE 2: Cross stays, atheist dies.

UPDATE: I'd recommend visiting SmallDeadAnimals while I'm tied up, for excellent posts on race & culture, "global warming", a Greenpeace founder's moment of clarity and much more. My other daily visits include RightGirl, BloodThirstyLiberal, WesternResistance and GatesOfVienna.

Another place to look for good stuff is the right hand sidebar at Mark Steyn's Greatest Hits page, under "Ports of Call."

***
As promised/threatened: I'm leaving Blogger after almost 7 years because their new and "improved" platform messed up my RSS feed, a situation they can't or won't fix.

Blogging will be irregular for the next few days as I make the transition.

Eventually, the very last (and topmost) post on this version of the blog will tell visitors to go to www.RelapsedCatholic.com from then on. I will redirect that url to the new server within a day or two.

Your patience is appreciated during this change. The good news is that the RSS feed will be working again; you'll have to resubscribe at the new site when it goes live.

David Warren: Baghdad express

2007-01-15T11:57:00.000-05:00

"President Bush is at his most Lincolnesque at the moment. Abraham Lincoln made most of the key decisions that ultimately won the American Civil War, over the opposition of Congress, public opinion, and most particularly, his generals. He was depicted in the press of his day much as Mr Bush is depicted in the media of our day: as a simpleton, in over his depth. Which doesn’t mean Bush is another Lincoln. But doesn’t preclude it, either."

PJ O'Rourke's new book -- for $1

2007-01-15T09:00:00.000-05:00

Actually, you get 5 books for $1 when you join the American Compass conservative book club.

Other new titles just out include Dinesh D'Souza's The Enemy at Home, Clint Johnson's The Politically Incorrect Guide to the South and Dr. Laura's latest, The Proper Care and Feeding of Marriage.

(Sorry: US residents only.)

BC Sikhs honour assassin who murdered Canadian official

2007-01-15T07:33:00.000-05:00

No wonder we didn't want to let you in!

"If a minority group doesn't like Canadian immigration policy, it is justified in murdering the government officials charged with enforcing it. Now that's multiculturalism with a vengeance!

"Let's be clear. If this article is accurate, the gurdwara is teaching its members to despise the British Canadians who built Canada. I don't believe in 'hate speech' laws, but I do note the inconsistency with which they are enforced. It seems to me saying a murdered Canadian official deserved to die is hateful speech. Assassinating a government official is a terrorist act whatever the circumstances. In honouring this assassin, the Sikhs at this gurdwara are honouring a terrorist.

"Does the gurdwara believe Sikhs today would be justified in assassinating a CSIS agent who was using informants to monitor Sikh extremists in Canada?"

Australia: Muslim group denounces "uncovered meat" sheik

2007-01-15T06:37:00.000-05:00

"In the television interview, the sheik labelled white Australians "liars" and said Muslims were more entitled to be in Australia than those with a convict heritage. (...)

"The sheik is on holiday in Egypt in what was supposed to be a self-imposed exile following comments he made late last year during a Ramadan speech at Sydney's Lakemba mosque.

"He compared immodestly-dressed women to 'uncovered meat' and said they were responsible for the sexual assaults they incur."

Well, half of 'em are happy...

2007-01-15T06:12:00.000-05:00

Is this a joke?

Guidebooks to Denmark correctly assert that winning the 1992 European Championship in football by beating Germany 2-0 in the final put Danes in such a state of euphoria that the country has not been the same since. This would explain the high plateau of life satisfaction in Denmark after 1992.

Football? 1992? Yet Euros call Americans shallow and stupid.

(Saith Julie Burchill: Show me a man who loves football and nine times out of ten you'll be pointing at a really bad shag.)

Here's one Dane who "slept with a smile on his face":

Lars Hedegaard is the former editor-in-chief of the left-leaning newspaper Information, and still declares himself to be left-wing. He claims that it’s not him, but the lefties who abandoned everything socialism used to stand for, such as freedom, culture, democracy, dignity, science and rational thinking.

In the wake of the Motoon affair he — like countless other Danes — felt the scales fall from his eyes. He’s now President of the ‘Danish Free Press Society’ and a vehement supporter of the free word. For that reason alone he’s normally excluded from the MSM, especially national TV.

I don’t know what went wrong that night, but somehow he slipped through DR’s “political correctness filter” and — in his usual calm and commonsense way — gave the assembled dimwits a run for their money.

UK: more on the schoolgirl and the crucifix

2007-01-15T06:06:00.000-05:00

According to the Telegraph, the school has a jewellery ban for certain grades; small cross lapel pins are allowed, however. My Catholic high school had a no-jewellery policy too, to cut down on status symbols.

I still don't understand the "health and safety" aspect -- sounds like bureaucratic and legal hoo-haw -- but the school's position otherwise seems reasonable. She should wear the regulation lapel pin instead of her crucifix.

The Gospel According to Oprah

2007-01-15T05:59:00.000-05:00

"Winfrey learned all about 'testifying' as a girl back in the Faith United Mississippi Baptist Church, where jealous peers often called her 'Miss Jesus.'

"But here's the irony, noted journalist Marcia Nelson, author of The Gospel According to Oprah Winfrey has become a billionaire and one of world's most powerful women by baring her soul and urging millions of others to follow her example, resulting in what some critics call the 'Oprahfication' of America. However, it's almost impossible to answer this simple question: What does Oprah believe?"

In the 70s, there was always some crazy chick named Annie

2007-01-14T17:14:00.000-05:00

I love Foxes and overlook its flaws because even though the release date is 1980, it is a quintessential 70s film that nobody talks about. Mostly because it is such a teenage girl movie; I doubt many men could sit through the whole thing. If Janis Ian's voice makes your life flash before your eyes, if you remember Love's Baby Soft and Bonnie Bell Lipsmackers and scented belted Kotex, you should really watch this movie. It will make you want to dig up your old Holly Hobby diary with the little fake lock on the front, either so you can re-read it or finally set it on fire, while playing "Kids of Tragedy" full blast. And "Magic Man".

A real turning point in my life came when I realised I no longer identified with the teenagers in movies but with the teachers and parents instead. It was like seeing my first grey hair. However, I still side with the teen girls in Foxes because their parents are divorced hippies or bully cops. I was never as free-spirited as these girls. Yeah, I hosted one party like that, jezuz. But I only pretended to understand when other kids (who were probably lying too) talked about acid or angel dust. I didn't lose my virginity until just before my 19th birthday -- wow, that was harder to type than I thought. It's like writing, "I used to have leprosy but it cleared up. Wanna see?" My years of dissipation came later.

So these girls were nothing like me, except the brunette with (of course) the big glasses, just like the ones I wore then. And I would end up with Randy Quaid, wouldn't I. (Was his dad the milkman, btw? Dennis?) I sort of would have loved to have been Cherrie Currie except for that bad haircut (which some women in Hamilton still have). She's so convincing I actually thought she died in real life too but apparently she was in Spinal Tap (?) and is now a "chainsaw carving artist" -- which comes as a gross, embarrassing let down but gets kind of neat if you give yourself a second or two to digest the idea.

Girls had shinier hair in the 70s. This guy noticed it too (we're the same age, and he's gay. His essay about Manhattan made me swoon with nostalgia, a sensation I enjoyed but then didn't. I read his piece first thing in the morning and almost called in sick with Stendhal Syndrome. You've been warned). "Birch plank" is the perfect description of Jodie Foster's hair too, not just Meryl Streep's. You were just more likely to see hair with that blinding Pantene shimmer because I suppose dulling gel and mouse and hairspray didn't come in until the 80s.

Even when she's nervous, Jodie Foster is appealingly self-assured, because she's feeling the fear and doing it anyway. You envy her that, along with that hair and those sharply cut features and how she doesn't have to wear makeup. ("Non-threatening teenage girl"?) She smiles so rarely that when she does you know you must be someone special. Molly Ringwald had that too but something was missing. Jodie Foster haunts you without even trying or meaning to, unlike a Dietrich who's all, "Look how unforgettable I am -- or else!" And you wish Jodie Foster was your best friend. Dietrich would forget your birthday cuz she was too busy skiing with Count Such-and-So.

Scott Baio rides a skateboard in this movie. Again, you're been warned.

And that is Laura Dern at the sliding door. So there's hope for everyone.

Devine and the ridiculous

2007-01-14T11:11:00.000-05:00

Yes, as you had heard, a 13-year-old Catholic girl in the UK has apparently been banned from wearing a crucifix because it violated "health and safety rules." After all, she could put someone's eye out with that thing...

All the stories cite the same Daily Mail source, word for word. I will watch for more detailed stories as they come out.

I thought of this story too but Karen beat me to it:

Years ago, I was at an Act One dinner where keynote speaker Randy Wallace shocked the room by saying, "I have never worn a cross around my neck and I never will." Then added, "Unless it becomes illegal, in which case, you can bet your ass I'll be wearing one the next day."

What a Canadian Celebrity Big Brother might look like

2007-01-13T12:09:00.000-05:00

"...who among us, be honest, doesn't harbour a homegrown Celebrity Big Brother fantasy cast? I shuffle my lineup almost every week. (I recently added Myriam Bedard and dropped Michael Ignatieff.)

"Mainstays include: Adrienne Clarkson (for storytelling around the fire); Douglas Coupland (for instant cool insights into the experience); Spenny from Kenny vs. Spenny (needs to break out on his own); Ralph Klein (unless the rumour is true and he is tagged for CBC's Dancing with the Canadian Stars); e-Talk's Tanya Kim (by all appearances, half a beer away from naked trampolining); The red-haired quirky gal who's in all those commercials (seems fun; somebody to root for); The Bountiful, B.C., polygamist Winston Blackmore (the requisite Lothario); And worldy wit Mark Steyn (for snark, game strategy and, on drunken nights in the hot tub, wicked anecdotes about real celebrities).

"Sometimes I stare at the blank TV screen and see them all wrestling in Kraft Dinner..."

***
I literally shuddered just then, didn't you?

My American readers don't realize that everyone up here knows who the "red-haired quirky gal" is, because there's some kind of Canadian union law that only 5 actors are allowed to be in TV commercials during any given era. Right now it's her, one of The Illustrated Men, and The Fat Guy. A few years back, it was the Tall Balding Guy with the Moustache, the Dude with the Pockmarked Face, and both McGraths. Don't ask me why.

Shut up about those damned little no-neck monsters!

2007-01-13T11:21:00.000-05:00

This sounds like me about 10 years ago, without the Western Civ bits, which never would have crossed my mind at the time. I've mellowed considerably, thanks to exposure to other people's kids. Still, none of my own, though. Too late. And you should all be as thrilled about that as I am:

I find it so reassuring when Our Dear Democratic, Progressive, Tolerant, And Did I Mention Democratic? Leaders drop their masks and admit that they think that no woman is fully human unless she has had a man put his seed in her and borne his spawn.

(...)

I am sick of hearing about the wonders of childbirthing and how we-uns should all get in the stirrups and shoot five or six out for the cause of Fambly, and if we don't we are selfish old shrews who will destroy Western Civilization and the Muslims and their twenty children per wife households will take over the world. Never mind that Western Civ is currently too weak-willed to do what it really takes to save itself* -- it might upset The Chillllldren™!

It gets better.

For many Gen-X females like me, the very thought of having children is too foreign to entertain. Maybe your mom matter-of-factly got you on The Pill for your sixteenth birthday, the way girls today get boob jobs and Mazdas. You watched Mary Tyler Moore and Police Woman. Worse (and you'd be surprised by the number of people who've told me identical tales) you were traumatised by movies like The Omen, Rosemary's Baby and all the others. (See: someone else noticed those release dates, too -- PS: Roe v Wade was 1973. There's an evil parasitical thing growing inside you that must be destroyed before IT kills YOU!!!)

And who would you rather be in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof? Liz Taylor or the ugly woman with the rude, homely offspring? Is that even a question? (UPDATE: Andrea interprets Maggie's behaviour differently. I say she's just really -- understandably -- hot for her husband, yet doesn't want kids of her own. I was gonna say because she'd ruin her figure but can't recall any lines that would support that. I'm the one who doesn't want her to ruin her figure because that would be a bigger tragedy for Civilization than her not having kids. It would be like blowing up the Venus deMilo...)

What good were children, you wondered? Don't they just make lots of noise and dirty diapers and cost lots of money (that's what your parents were always saying about you. My job in my family was to go buy cigarettes for my stepfather when he was too drunk to go himself. You have to "earn your keep" somehow.) Don't they just get kidnapped, in million-selling novels and in real life?

(What was the name of that huge bestseller with the off center drawing of the house on the cover, and the pre-tornado sky and the one red mitt left fornlornly on the front lawn, with a title like Have You Seen the Children?. Everybody had a copy of that book in their bathroom and just the cover scared the holy hell out of me. UPDATE:Thanks, James, for reminding me -- Where Are The Children. I used the original cover rather than the 30th Anniversary one you sent. Isn't that so "Dick & Perry then sped off"?)

Or hit by cars, like your babysitter's son? Or else you end up with some Go Ask Alice trouble maker.

Maybe, like me, you learned an unintended lesson from being taught by nuns of varying degrees of hip coolness from nursery school to Grade 13 (that's how old I am).

I admire women my age who finally went ahead and did it -- I can appreciate the daunting mental and emotional work involved, un-brainwashing yourself like that. I guess it helps if you have a maternal instinct and I don't think I do. "Would you like a real little baby like that when you grow up?" someone asked me when I was three and playing with my Raggedy Ann doll. "NO!" I screamed back. Another real kid would just wreck all my toys. Or something. I can still hear that "No!" I knew what it meant, and I meant it.

No wonder he lives in Toronto (but only when it's sufficiently warm and "interesting"

2007-01-13T10:58:00.000-05:00

We haven't heard much from Toronto/Iranian blogger "Hoder" for a while; time was I thought Jeff Jarvis was going to start an official fan club for the guy. 2002 seems like a long time ago.

He fits right in around here, as you'll see from a this Hugh Hewitt interview:

HH: Hossein, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. There are no radical Christians running around George Bush who believe in ushering in the End Times by the occasioning of chaos. That’s just not true. Do you have any names to go with…

HD: But the evidence is suggesting something else, actually.

HH: No, actually, it’s not. There isn’t anyone. Not one. You name me one name of a radical Christian…

HD: It doesn’t matter who is close to Bush or who is not. The policies that they’re doing, the invasion of Iraq, the whole rhetoric of you’re either with us or against us, and lots of other policies that come from that ideology, suggesting that they also believe in that, and it’s even more dangerous, because they’re more popular than this small group of Iranians who are supporting Ahmadinejad.

HH: Hossein, if, in fact, anyone believed that, and they believed in ushering in the End Times, they’d have had six years to start it by now.

HD: I don’t really know, but the evidence that I’m seeing from the Bush administration is much more dangerous than anything that you can see from Ahmadinejad’s government.

(...)

HH: When will you be back in Toronto?

HD: I’m not actually sure. I think Europe is much more of an interesting place than the freezing Canada, these days, in this winter.

Well then why don't you just sod off, then, sonny boy? The cost of living is pretty high in this city. I wonder where he gets the money to do so much galavanting. Those tacky pop-ups on his site surely don't generate that much revenue.

The weird thing about that "Canada" line is: we've had an unseasonably warm Toronto winter. Today's high is F51, which means among other things that all the young dudes in Boystown will be cruising the park in cutoffs this aft. In here, I had to shut off the heat. So "freezing" is the last word any of us would use to describe this winter's weather. Nice powers of perception, guy.

His warped ideas about US Christians and so on make him the perfect Torontonian otherwise.

I'm with See-Dubya; don't trust a pothead's geo-political musings.

Coren: Little Mosque is "visual drudgery"

2007-01-13T10:20:00.000-05:00

"The usual visual drudgery. Awful Canadian actors mouthing lamentable dialogue packed with cliches and telegraphed attempts at humour. The bland leading the bland. And all paid for by your tax dollars -- including the huge advertising campaign for the project. Public money that could otherwise have been spent on something trivial like a nurse in an intensive care ward.

(...)

"The non-Muslim caricatures, however, are repugnant. Especially if they're cops.

"You know cops. The poor fools who have to put their lives on the line during a terrorist attack. A terrorist attack which, naturally, could never have anything to do with Islam.

"By the way, in the month of December alone there were 249 jihadist incidents around the world, resulting in 1,794 deaths and 1,589 people being critically injured."

A brief and very funny history of writers' feuds

2007-01-13T10:13:00.000-05:00

"With great sadness we learn that the Colombian Nobel prize winner Gabriel García Márquez and the Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, after a thrillingly long and bitter feud, are patching up their differences. (...) Writers have always conducted colourful feuds, and the García Máarquez-Vargas Llosa vendetta was one of the best. Once they were the closest friends. García Márquez was godfather to Vargas Llosa’s son. Then relations cooled, their political paths diverged, and three decades ago, for reasons that have never been fully explained by either side, the friendship came to an end with a fierce fist-fight in a Mexican cinema."

(...)

"Norman Mailer, the veteran fighter-writer, is another who upholds the long-established tradition that if you can’t beat ’em, thump ’em. Mailer sat on Truman Capote, headbutted and punched Gore Vidal, and stabbed his first wife with a penknife when she called him a 'faggot'. He wrote to William Styron, after a disobliging review: 'I will invite you to a fight in which I expect to stomp out of you a fat amount of your yellow and treacherous shit.'"

(...)

"Revenge should be served not only cold, but with the most elaborate garnish. Bevis Hillier recently served up such a dish to A.N. Wilson, his rival Betjeman biographer, by planting on him a fake letter from an invented mistress in which the first character of each sentence spelt an offensive message.

"Vladimir Nabokov and the critic Edmund Wilson fell out after a quarter-century of close friendship over the precise translation of a single Russian phrase in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin."

(...)

"The joy of Cook and Mailer was their eagerness not only to give but to take offence openly; to respond to an original slight, whether intended or not, with overwhelming and disproportionate rudeness; to hone resentment over time, and deliver the insulting punchline immediately after the punch. 'Words fail Norman Mailer yet again,' said Vidal, after Mailer had floored him with a single blow in a television studio. The remark was far too brilliant to have been spontaneous.

"These are the hallmarks of the truly great feud. Never forgive or reconcile. Never back down. Land the first blow and extract the last laugh, even if that means chiselling it onto your headstone. ('I told you I was ill!' wails Spike Milligan’s epitaph.) Above all, take the fight to the enemy. In 1936 Wallace Stevens the poet, drunk, accosted Ernest Hemingway at a party and sneered: 'So, you think you’re Ernest Hemingway?' The resulting punch-up left both writers battered, and even more famous."

Paul Tuns: 10 Things I Don't Care About

2007-01-12T10:56:00.000-05:00

Yeah, I'm citing him a lot; he's been on a roll. I was just thinking of making a list like this, but he beat me to it and said most of what I'd say anyhow:

9. Quebec -- Although I find the effect of Quebec on Canadian politics fascinating, I don't care whether Quebec remains part of Canada or not.

8. Aboriginals -- I think they got a bum deal. Get over it. It's time to join the larger society.

6. Space exploration -- The issue is not at all interesting to me. I understand that there is important research (military and civilian) associated with the space program. Let me know when they find something.

3. AIDS in North America & Europe -- My heart goes out to women and children in the developing world who contract AIDS/HIV; the socio-legal realities in many countries make them innocent victims of not just a deadly disease but the injustices (abusive and philandering husbands, the devaluing of females, the helplessness of children, etc...) that permit the disease to spread wildly and indiscriminately. But for almost all North American adults suffering from the disease, it is a result of lifestyle choices and I'd rather see society's time and energy used to curb the social pathologies that lead to the spread of AIDS than wasting one second fretting about not-so-innocent victims.

I'd add: The Environment. It's green and brown -- two ugly colours that don't even match. Also it smells. I'm moving from indifference to all-out hatred the more I have to hear about Nature. What good are 5,000 extra polar bears unless we can train them to fight terrorists? Swiping them with their big paws or something...

Mr. Death: so how does it end?

2007-01-12T10:16:00.000-05:00

I had to take a call half-way through Errol Morris' Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr..

Does he come to realize what a goof he's being? Doesn't sound like it.

What I did get to see was a finely wrought meditation on vanity and its many traps.

I also beheld a living example of my conspiracy-theorists-are-borderline-autistic theory. But my theory may be just as silly as Leuchter's, right?

Why I hate Canadian electoral politics

2007-01-12T06:31:00.000-05:00

(LINK FIXEd)

"Today was the second day in a row a Tory staffer has said this to me: 'No snow, no election.' The Conservatives, they both said, can't win if people in Ottawa and Toronto and southwestern Ontario can't remember snow on the ground sometime between now and the March break because it gives credence to the idea that global warming is a fact and that it is getting worse under the Tories.

"Now, a good snow between now and mid-March doesn't disprove global warming any more than a green winter proves it. Weather patterns change and have abnormalities without man's fingerprints being all over the big weather machine in the sky. And even if man is reponsible, it can hardly all be blamed on the government in power since last January. But none of that matters. Suburban middle class voters can't go skiing and will take it out on Stephen Harper's Conservatives if they don't get some quality time at the various ski resorts..."

Peggy Noonan: Neither Iraqis nor Democrats seem ready to do what's required of them

2007-01-12T06:20:00.000-05:00

"The question that suddenly began to crop up in all the talk after the speech was: What will fill the vacuum if America simply says, 'We gave it our best, but the Iraqi people didn't seem to want to cooperate in their freedom, so we will have to leave'? The talk was grim and believable. Ethnic cleansing, religious warfare, geopolitical machinations potentially harmful -- almost certainly harmful, and deeply so -- to America and the West. One argument seems tired and not true. It is that if we leave Iraq, the terrorists of the world will have a safe place in which to gather, coalesce, plan and move. They already have such places, in the Mideast and outside it, and maybe here. Terrorists hide, and the world is full of hiding places..."

For updates on the US Embassy bombing in Athens...

2007-01-12T06:17:00.000-05:00

I'd recommend Michelle Malkin's blog; guests like Mary Katherine Ham are posting there while she's in Iraq.

Hitler Meets Christ: A Michael Moriarty Film

2007-01-12T05:54:00.000-05:00

"Hitler Meets Christ was a recognition of how deeply performing in Holocaust affected Moriarty, who won a Golden Globe for his role as Nazi Erik Dorf in the landmark 1978 TV mini-series. 'I had to write Hitler Meets Christ to try to understand why such evil can exist. My role in Holocaust was most intriguing, because the author (Gerald Green) really captured a human being turning rotten in front of your eyes."

(...)

"Moriarty says Hitler Meets Christ is 'a comedy inasmuch as it allows the audience to laugh at Hitler, and a tragedy in that he's really a poor homeless man trapped and imprisoned by the soul of Hitler.' Even as a subject for debate between two of society's outcasts, the possibility of Hitler's redemption for his monstrous crimes is a theme that is bound to stir controversy."

In other news:

Golden Globe, Emmy, and Tony Award winning actor, writer, and musician as well as conservative patriot, Michael Moriarty recently announced his interest in running for President of the United States in 2008. He's doing it to take on Hollywood's liberal-left establishment and the Globalists.

"If a Hollywood star denigrates the war on terrorism or promotes gay marriage, he or she is welcomed with open arms by the Oprah Winfreys of the world. But if he or she holds views that are considered conservative or libertarian, doors begin to close," said Moriarty.

The "Globalists"? Urgh.

14 Carter Center advisers resign

2007-01-12T05:49:00.000-05:00

in protest over Jimmah's book.

"I don't know what J-school Kinsella attended..."

2007-01-12T05:40:00.000-05:00

"...but at the one I went to, the instructors, all former journalists, said there is no such thing as off the record. I generally think that the decent thing for a journalist to do is not to use the comments. And frankly Nicholas Kohler was kinda silly to actually quote the 'off the record' part of the quote.

"But sources shouldn't trust journalists because journalists have a certain obligation to report pertinent facts they know are true -- and a person's statement about his or her impression of what a friend is likely to do is a reportable fact. The understanding of every person dealing with a journalist is that their comments during interviews are fair game. If you don't want it appearing in print or being broadcast, don't say it."

Finally: Dennis Miller gets daily radio show

2007-01-11T14:20:00.000-05:00

L.A. a.m. drive time, no less.

Denmark: no charge for seditious Muslims who provoked cartoon crisis

2007-01-11T06:44:00.000-05:00

"Anything else would have been a disaster for the imams and their image."

Right Wing Trash: cult icon Michael Berryman

2007-01-11T06:36:00.000-05:00

"I believe in capital punishment. I don’t think somebody can kill my family and say, 'I’m nuts!' and write a book about it and go free. A police officer, off the record, will tell you if it happens to them, they’ll blow their heads off. Us private citizens, they don’t want us to have guns. If you kill my mother, I’m not going to sit there, you’re gonna get punished. Theresa Saldana was stabbed 20-some odd times, and the lunatic is going to be released. People say that I’m a barbarian about it, then I’m a barbarian about it. We need a little more frontier justice."

Richard Gere and the Indian Hookers

2007-01-11T06:33:00.000-05:00

"I like Richard Gere. He’s kind of the Rain Man of Hollywood: His intentions are sweet and he’s good at specific things like acting, but when he talks politics it’s like watching 'the special kid' eat mud."

Ann Coulter on the Duke "rape" case

2007-01-11T06:18:00.000-05:00

"Liberal professors believe that crying wolf is valuable for calling attention to the societal problem of wolves, even though there's never a wolf in any particular case. Evidently, awareness of an alleged societal ill -– of which we have no actual examples -– is worth ruining the lives of three innocent people. After all, they're just powerful white men.

"At the next White Males of Privilege meeting, someone ought to bring up how they can use their vast power to win the right not to be put on trial for crimes they didn't commit."

A LePen victory would be terrible

2007-01-11T06:12:00.000-05:00

"It would set back during a critical period the respectability and plausibility of those who would like, correctly, to put a complete halt to Muslim immigration -- and to find ways not to engage in the hopeless task of large-scale 'integration' of a population whose belief-system, a Complete System of Regulation, tells them that they are there to possess, to sweep away obstacles so that Islam will 'dominate and is not to be dominated.'

"Le Pen is a crude racist and antisemite. Furthermore, he has shown that his antisemitism remains steady while his attitude toward Arabs and Islam wavers. He was a great supporter of Saddam Hussein, and remains anti-American in one of the recognizable French traditions of anti-Americanism, America as the land of thrusting capitalist skyscrapers as opposed to the certain verities of the French terroir, including Jose Bove's farmers.

"What would be the American equivalent..?

Rick McGinnis: more Life with Father

2007-01-11T06:00:00.000-05:00

"The other day, my oldest daughter burst through the door of my office, naked and playing a kazoo, her long pale limbs flailing around in an antic little dance that probably worked with whatever scabby old punk tune or chugging bit of '80s indie rock I was playing at the time. I wish I'd had a camera handy -- footage of my 3-year-old capering starkers to the Volcano Suns would probably be valuable at some point later in her life. Well, perhaps not valuable; amusing -- to me, if only as a scrap of digital footage that I could threaten to call up on some glowing flat panel in some future home whenever I needed to embarass her - mortification of our kin being something of a tradition in my family..."

***
I don't "hate" "Cat's in the Cradle". There are songs you love or hate, but some refuse to be categorized. When I'd go to parties (when I still went to parties) and that song was played, everyone would sing along melodramatically, and pretend they were all busted up, especially at that very last line. Except some of us weren't pretending.

But at least I'll be talented in the morning

2007-01-10T18:45:00.000-05:00

Pretty much the only Dead White Male inventions I can't bring myself to defend are all those rules of the rhetorical road that take all the fun out of fighting. They're like condoms for your brain. Slippery slopes are real. Straw men? Come on -- he was the neatest guy in Oz. Ad hominem? It is SO relevant that Michael Moore is fat and you know it, too.

I insult people all the time. Other bloggers insult me. If only they would -- I dunno -- do it better...

Take Warren Kinsella.

I'm prepared to excuse almost anything -- Liberal Party hackership, a law degree, skin as thin as Nicole Ritchie after a coffee enema -- if the offending package also contains a minimum daily requirement of talent.

Warren took time out of his manic midlife crisis (some guys buy sports cars, he files lawsuits) to notice that I wrote this at Kate's place:

Kinsella's latest for the Post, about the execution footage of Saddam Hussein, managed to say absolutley nothing original in the space of 700 words, using [the] most hamfisted prose imaginable.

Couldn't they just give Colby Cosh Kinsella's space instead? He's got more hair, too...

So what does Warren take issue with here? At his "blog", he lets his dozen readers know:

Funny. I particularly like getting mocked for my physical appearance by the Constipated Catholic, who gives a wholly new dimension to the phrase "unsightly gnome." Get back under your toadstool, you hateful dwarf, or we'll get Gandalf to cast a spell on you!

Now, guys who call their "blogs" -- are you ready for this? -- "Musings" really shouldn't make fun of my site's (exceedingly clever) handle. It's like the name of his "band" -- out of, what, 10 million words in the English language, Warren chooses these three for his punk combo: "Shit." "From." "Hell." Heck, Warren, I'll let you use the Receding Hairlines if you ask nice...

Speaking of hair, here's the problem with Warren's high dudgeon: that Colby Cosh has more hair than he does is simply a demonstrable, objective fact. No ad hominem there. That Colby Cosh's toe nail clippings, even the ones in that month old pizza box, also have more writing talent than all of Warren's body parts put together is also pretty obvious to the unbiased observer. Note, however, that Warren doesn't take issue with that, because he's smart enough to know he'd lose.

Like most homely women, I'm terribly vain. Yeah, it stings to get called an "unsightly gnome", but it's much closer to the truth than, say, "Bettie Page look alike" or "Scarlett Johannsen's virtual clone". My failure to conform to long established standards of attractiveness (standards I have no argument with, incidentally -- I could stare at both of those women for hours and I'm a raging het) causes me intermitent anguish.

However, ugliness has its consolations, even for females. Remember Fraser on Cheers, meeting his future wife for the first time? "Normally women of your limited physical appeal attempt to compensate by developing a pleasant personality"? Naw, I didn't either, as you know. Never dawned on me to bother. But if I'd been graced with the genetic gifts of my older half-sister, who -- unlike many people who only think they do -- really did look like Marilyn Monroe, I likely would have ended up like she did: a pregnant unwed high school dropout whose son no longer speaks to her, assuming she can even be found. The last time I saw her she was passed out in a bowl of Ceasar salad, sometime in the mid-90s. For all I know, she's still there.

Beauty fades; stupid is forever. And I must be doing something right: not a few people have expressed their surprise that my fiance is much better looking than I am. Go ask.

No, what I have is talent. I've no need to flip through my thesaurus to mount a volley of empty calorie adjectives when I want to get someone good. Can one really "give" a "whole new dimension"? And does the part about Gandalf even make sense? I know it follows from dwarf, but... what kind of spell would a wizard put on an already ugly individual -- a "beauty" one? Gandalf couldn't possibly make me any shorter or give me more cellulite. And besides, I'd whale him in the crotch with his own staff before he got the chance.

See, here's how it's done: I can't find a link, but not long ago Rick McGinnis wrote something or other about Andy Warhol, to whit:

All his life, Warhol was plagued by insecurities about his appearance -- most of which were perfectly justified.

Now that's writing. Merely stringing together a series of words until your counter says 700 is not:

Put down your pen. That's what some of us were taught in journalism school, anyway. When the intended subject of an interview says that what he or she has to say is "off the record," then that's the end of the interview, pretty much. The reporter in question should put down his or her pen and turn off any and all recording devices. No reporting of what is said. Period.

Got that? Put. Down. Your. Pen. Downdowndown. Placez la pen de la tante (ou ton oncle) sur la table. Or "dans," as the case may be...

That too many people get paid to "write" such things can only be explained as the residue of original sin.

On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog. So, yes, I'm resigned to being an unsightly gnome. But at least... well, you know how it goes...

Yep, my RSS feed is still busted

2007-01-10T18:39:00.000-05:00

It's the new Blogger's fault, and since they can't or won't fix it, I'm hoping to move to a new platform by the end of this week. Thanks to everyone who wrote in with their concerns -- I really am working on a solution.

David Warren: Against polygamy

2007-01-10T09:03:00.000-05:00

"My two standard themes -- the advance of Islamist fanaticism in the world, and the West’s decline into decadence -- start coming together in the subject of 'polygamy'.

"We will have legalized polygamy in Canada very soon. This is thanks to a decision of the Ontario Appeals Court last week -- that so far no one has had the stomach to take higher -- creating, in law, three parents for one child.

(...)

"The irony here is that a decadent lesbo-feminist ideology is being used to force 'reforms' that create the conditions for the societal arrangements in the remoter parts of Somalia and Afghanistan. That will, given the rest of human nature, soon reduce women to chattels, while obviating the power in women to restrain the excesses of men.

"Wake up, gentle reader. If you don’t want polygamy in Canada, you had better start making a loud noise. For the internal enemies of our civilization have laid all the groundwork for this coup de grace."

Little Mosque on the Prairie: all that ham should be haram

2007-01-10T05:45:00.000-05:00

"There are a lot of imams going around (suggesting) people watch (it)," said Mohamed Elmasry, president of the Canadian Islamic Congress and an imam himself.

"I believe it's about time for Muslims to laugh at themselves -– we are a latecomer into comedy." (...) "Elmasry hopes the show –- the brainchild of Zarqa Nawaz, herself a Muslim –- will have a 'spillover effect south of the border' and inspire similar TV fare.

"'I think they should learn from Canadians, that this is the best remedy to a high level of anxiety among American Muslims,' said Elmasry."

Meanwhile, CAIR-CAN's press release was hopeful and positive but added, "Whether or not this comedy will gain wide appeal remains to be seen. This will be determined, by-in-large, by the quality of the comedy presented and whether or not Canadians as a whole feel they can relate to the material presented."

Glad somebody mentioned that. Good intentions are fatal to art in general and comedy in particular. Little Mosque's pilot has good intentions up the wazoo, but too much of the acting hovered around "high school assembly" level -- you'd think all that ham would be haram...

Ditto the writing (although I'll cop to smiling at the old imam's list of temptations: wine gums, "liquor-ish"...) A second pair of eyes might have tightened it up: "It may have been God who said, 'let there be light,' but it's me that pays the electric bill" is twice as long as it should be ("God said 'let there be light,' but He doesn't pay the electric bill.")

As others have noted, the non-Muslim characters are buffoons, and not even convincing ones -- the right wing radio host sounds more like Michael Savage than any Canadian broadcaster in existence, while the handyman popped his eyes, blustered and stumbled around like a white version of Amos and/or Andy.

The airport sequence was the worst. If I overheard a young Muslim male in my check in line say the word "suicide" into his cell phone, I'd alert security, too -- and if you wouldn't, for shame. Joking about bombs in the airport then being outraged when the cops question you? Fly much?

TV pilots are notoriously bad. The first episode of Cheers makes you wonder how the show got picked up. Little Mosque shows some promise: it's weirdly reassuring to finally see Muslims poke fun at their own religious practices (like how to determine the beginning of Ramadam) the way Catholics (Father Ted) and Jews (you name it) have done for ages.

But watching it felt more like a duty than a pleasure. I give it 2 out of 5 crescent moons.

UPDATE: note Professional Writer(tm) John Doyle's use of the word "terrific" twice in the same sentence, then squeezing in that "hegemony" right at the end -- take THAT, America!! Surely the Chimpy McHitlerburton Death Squad Cabals are now shaking in their (sweatshop manufactured) boots with fright.

At least I didn't have an affair with a married man then get an abortion

2007-01-09T15:31:00.000-05:00

Hey, Suzanne "At least I don't have a kid in Iraq" Somers is right -- you really can put a positive spin on just about anything:

At least I'm not the public face of Thighmaster.

At least I didn't have a minor role in Billy Jack Goes To Washington.

See, it's easy!

When her autobiographical Broadway show bombed, Suzanne was bitter: I was lying there naked, and [the critics] decided to kick me and step on me, just like these visions you see in Iraq.

Could she even locate Iraq on a map? ("Is it that sort of square thing over near China?")

Anyway: her house burned down.

Aw.

Does that make Rick Mercer a scab?

2007-01-09T12:26:00.000-05:00

Pleeeeeze.

The one you've been waiting for: Mark Steyn on Oriana Fallaci

2007-01-09T09:19:00.000-05:00

"Who ya gonna believe? The President’s sappy 'religion of peace' speeches or your lyin’ eyes? La Fallaci (as she styled herself) disdained what the French philosopher Alain Finkelkraut calls the west’s 'penitential narcissism' and, in an age of absurd abasement, found many takers for her bravura rejection thereof. After all, if Muslims are so ready to take offence, you might as well give ’em some. (...)

"I never really thought cancer would get Oriana Fallaci. She seemed so full of fire in the last few years that one felt certain any tumor would shrivel to ash inside her. But the legal harassment from her enemies and their appeasers must have taken their toll. The books were huge sellers but old friends kept their distance. As for those on the left who acknowledged the threat, she parted company there, too. This year, a dozen intellectuals, including Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Salman Rushdie, published a manifesto against Islamism and in defense of 'secular values for all'. All are doughty warriors and important allies in Europe’s present struggle. But La Fallaci, a lifelong atheist, had come to the conclusion that secular humanism was an insufficient rallying cry, that it had in some sense led to the gaping nullity of contemporary European identity which Islam had simply steamrollered. By the end, she was if not a Christian then, as she formulated it, a 'Christian atheist”'. In 2005 she was granted a private audience with Pope Benedict on the understanding that she would never divulge what was discussed. It would be interesting to know, but it’s safe to say that for once it wasn’t 'Go fuck yourself. I say what I want.'"

Rick McGinnis on Little Mosque on the Prairie

2007-01-09T09:08:00.000-05:00

"Frankly, you can’t blame the CBC for trying -– if your mandate involves some vague direction to explore what we’ve come, with tightened sphincters, to call our "national identity," then this is exactly the sort of topic they should be taking a swing at; in any case, it beats yet another sentimental period drama featuring a plucky young girl coming of age in the midst of turn-of-the-century rural tedium.

"Depressingly, the unnamed non-Muslim locals are mostly painted as yokels, the talk-radio host is set up as the series’ likely villain, while the Muslim characters get a much softer treatment, even the orthodox former imam, whose hints of bigotry and sexism -– too well documented in Islam’s fundamentalist wing -– should, you’d think, be anathema to CBC dogma.

"The problem with Little Mosque is simply a lack of cruelty. Good comedy is essentially mean, and if Nawaz is happy to trade in diminishing clichés, she should have been just as willing to spread them around. Judging from the first episode, Little Mosque obviously isn’t a character comedy, based around the eccentrics populating its rural setting. That show would have been Corner Mosque, and while it would have reeked of imitation, it would have been a more interesting prospect than yet another frantic but flaccid comedy running on bald and punctured gags."

***
I suppose we can take some pleasure in the sight of a "right wing radio host" on Canadian airwaves, even a fictional one. My earlier post on Little Mosque is here.

So does diarrhea

2007-01-09T05:45:00.000-05:00

Why are people impressed when a book or movie "moves really fast"? Are your tastes that low and coarse? Hey, mine are too but there has to be more going on than just manipulative pacing. "It was over so quickly!" is an odd selling point...

Left-wing do-gooder murdered in New Orleans

2007-01-08T16:54:00.000-05:00

"The most recent murder, in the early hours of Thursday morning, was of a young wife in the pleasant middle-class Fauborg Marigny district. The woman and her husband had a two-year-old son. Police found the husband, shot three times but still alive, clutching the infant near the front door of the house. The wife had been killed by a gunshot wound to the neck. The husband has survived.

These were educated white liberals -— they had been dormitory mates at Harvard -— who had returned to New Orleans after Katrina to do good works in 'the community.' The husband, a doctor, ran a clinic that turned no one away. (...) The couple also ran a feed-the-homeless enterprise named Food Not Bombs. You get the picture. These were not Republican voters.

"What happened to this young couple was unspeakably horrible, and there is of course no excusing such barbarism. It is hard, though, not to shake your head at the couple’s unworldly naivety."

Well, duh: Scotland superior to "Palestine"

2007-01-08T16:12:00.000-05:00

"And what about other famous Palestinians through the millennia -— the architects and scientists and writers and spiritual leaders? Among proud Scots, the world has recognized the likes of Alexander Graham Bell, Adam Smith, John Knox, David Hume, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, James Watt, Alexander Fleming, Andrew Carnegie and many, many more.

"If even the most devoted supporters of Palestinian nationalism were asked to identify a famous representative of that nationality who had gained notoriety prior, say, to 1950, who could they name?

"If a people who claim that their origins stretch back into 'the mists of time' can’t identify a single famous figure as one of their own –- no, not one -- what does it say about the authenticity of their historic nationality?

2007: "The Canadian political blogosphere will have its first sex scandal"

2007-01-08T13:48:00.000-05:00

Oh ugh.

Bob Tarantino's inspired:

I say we open a pool on who the scandal will involve.

Obviously, "not Kathy Shaidle" is my first best guess, and should be yours too.

Kateland comments:

Well, I guess I could be sufficiently bribed to post some of the outrageous things men in the blogsphere have sent me via email.

Kate, I hate you -- do tell!!

I'm Website of the Day

2007-01-08T06:36:00.000-05:00

At RightWingNews -- thanks, John (who also posts a video he calls "The Islamic Guide to Beating Your Wife".)

RightWingNews readers may particularly enjoy my recent "looking back at Katrina" post. Then again, you may not.

But it's so much easier to blame the Jews!

2007-01-08T06:31:00.000-05:00

"Arabs have a different attitude towards work. While Americans have a thing for 'keeping busy' and being entrepreneurs, Arabs look up to the man of leisure. Government jobs, which require little work, are much sought after in the Arab countries. While there are hard workers and entrepreneurs in Arab countries, they are not admired as they are in the United States. This difference in attitudes creates all sorts of 'culture clash' problems, as both groups see their attitudes as the natural and normal ones. Each groups sees the others attitudes as alien and odd. However, the lack of hard work and initiative is a major reason why the Arab world has fallen behind other cultures in the last fifty years.

"Arabs really have a problem with personal responsibility, which is a bedrock characteristic in any strong economy. The cause of this Arab problem is the concept of 'inshallah' ('If God wills it.') This is a basic tenet of Islam, although some scholars believe the attitude preceded that religion. In any event, 'inshallah' is deadly when combined with modern technology..."

***
UPDATE: the invaluable Andrea points to "15 Rules for Understanding the Middle East".

Also: A reader writes (and I paraphrase): "Personal responsibility", "different attitude towards work" -- sounds like Arabs make pretty lousy conservatives, too.

Something else to be concerned about as more and more of them trudge down our streets in their burquas -- and presumably vote.

American Fascists breaks Brooks' Rule*, doesn't even impress LAT

2007-01-08T06:17:00.000-05:00

"The Christian right could come to power, he suggests, if we had 'another catastrophic terrorist attack, an economic meltdown or huge environmental disaster.' At that point, Hedges asserts, evangelical leaders such as Kennedy, Falwell and Robertson could be 'calling for the punishment, detention and quarantining of gays and lesbians — as well as abortionists, Muslims and other nonbelievers.' Thus, Hedges concludes, the United States today faces an internal threat analogous to that posed by the Nazis in Weimar Germany.

"There are problems with this analogy. (...) A 2004 survey for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on PBS found that a majority of evangelicals have an unfavorable view of Falwell and that a significant minority of them are more concerned about jobs and the economy than about abortion and gay marriage.

"And it isn't as if conservative Christians are the only obstacle to gay marriage: Yes, 85% of white evangelicals oppose gay marriage, but in the general population the figure is 61%.

"In fact, the differences between today's Christian right and the movements led by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini are greater than the similarities. Hitler was more pagan than Christian. Street violence was a key tactic of Mussolini's Brownshirts; the Christian right has focused on nonviolent demonstrations outside U.S. abortion clinics and on changing laws at the ballot box. And there's a big difference between supporting laws against gay marriage and putting gays in concentration camps.

(*)

"Until Tuesday morning, every child ever born had two parents..."

2007-01-07T19:00:00.000-05:00

"What can be done about the decision of their court? Nothing -- politically or judicially, because in Canada today we do not have politicians or judges with the courage to stand against the New Age breeze. They are terrified of what the 'progressive' factions in the media, bureaucracies, universities, and in particular, the law-school cliques, could do to them. This in turn leaves the Canadian people defenceless against experimental ideologies being pumped down our throats by a revolutionary legal establishment, dripping with hubris.

"Yet the laws of nature will not be overthrown. We work with them, or we work against them. When we work with them, we do not try to break them. When we work against them, they break us. In this case, the victims won't be three foolish old judges, but the whole society their decision undermines."

War against radical Islam: we must win at any cost

2007-01-07T18:54:00.000-05:00

"I've written about Herb [Meyer] before, and how his DVD The Siege of Western Civilization is an international bestseller.

"Well, Meyer has produced yet another authoritative paper warning us how, if we don't halt radical Islam in its tracks -- and free moderate Muslims from its totalitarian rule -- western civilization itself will fall. (...)

"The way Meyer sees it, we haven't quite decided if we have the will -- the guts -- to destroy radical Islam and not only preserve our democratic way of life, but to spread it to other people.The mess in Iraq is because we haven't 'hit the Radical Islamic operating system hard enough to crush it,' he writes. To do so, we have to 'get set for a level of fighting we haven't seen since the darkest days of the Second World War.'"

Lonely, with an explanation

2007-01-07T11:30:00.000-05:00

Michelle Malkin issues a correction re: that widely posted, and mocked, pic of Kerry eating alone in Iraq: "In this particular instance, it appears, Kerry was not spurned by the troops. I stand corrected and apologize for the error."

Ed Morrisey writes about blogger credibility in general:

I'm not attempting to discredit the first-person narrative at Hennen's. This post is about two issues: jumping to rather large conclusions based on a single photograph and the news value of those conclusions. Running the post I wrote was a mistake on those two counts, even if everything Hennen's correspondent wrote was true (which I assume it was).

(...)

Bloggers erred by presuming too quickly that Jamil Hussein did not exist at all, a mistake that I noted in my post yesterday would damage the credibility of the bloggers' focus on the larger question of Hussein's credibility. However, that question still remains, and it can't be answered while people make silly accusations about how a few weeks worth of mentions on political blogs somehow endangered Hussein in a way that having his name splashed across the world's newspapers for seven months could not do. Too many contradictions remain in his sourcing to just accept that his existence means that everything he said was true. One of the major questions is why the AP ran such inflammatory stories with just a single source in a region where propaganda artists are looking to manipulate Western media outlets for the promotion of terrorists

Rabble.ca sometimes good for something

2007-01-07T06:03:00.000-05:00

One forum participant writes:

"A Week without Women” is a reality-type show in production for CBC that's being called a "social experiment" in which all the women in a small town leave town for a week, and men are left to perform roles normally taken on by women. Sites are being looked at in BC and Alberta.

Another poster writes:

Readers might like to note that the UK version was a disaster for both the BBC and the village concerned, Harby, where I live.

We were the first victims of this dreadful programme idea. I would advise any community thinking of accepting ‘the challenge’ to tell the producers where to go. It’s divisive, it’s staged, it’s harmful and it’s not even good TV! The original series was made by the BBC by a team with something to prove (quite what we never really found out), but along the way it split our tiny community of 240 people and the damage still reverberates nearly two years on.

More details follow. Normally I'm a fan of anything a leftist describes as "divisive" and "harmful". I post this because, while it's hardly news that "reality" programming gets a boost or ten through deception, comments from someone that close to the (staged) action are a rare treat.

Yep, that fake Hinterland Who's Who "Crack Spider" video is brilliant

2007-01-06T12:59:00.000-05:00

Possibly the greatest YouTube.com video ever, past, present and future.

Too bad the guy who made it hates George Bush, feels sorry for terrorists, and is misinformed about Gitmo. I mean, he could have at least mentioned the La-Z Boy interogration chairs -- the truth really can be funnier than fiction.

But he also mocks Angelina Jolie as the "Womb Raider", so perhaps there's still hope for this inarguably talented fellow. I used to be a young, bratty, reflexively lefty Canadian m'self...

And yeah, I love his handle, too.

"Anybody know anyone who parks their car out in a storm to enjoy a 'blizzard bash'?"

2007-01-06T12:02:00.000-05:00

Kate: have I told you lately that I love you...?

"Do they sit on their front steps with the grandkids in Kansas with order-in pizza and wait for the tornado?

"How about forest fire parties? ('I've been through plenty of these boys, going to stock up on beer and sit it out. My house ain't burned yet'.)

"Was anyone caught on tape looting during the Quebec ice storm?

"Yet, in New Orleans and other southern states, when told to evacuate because a Cat 5 is bearing down.... what do they do?

"They have hurricane parties.

"Then, when the party is 'over', it's Bush's fault."

And I respond to "sarge":

Sarge, are you really a "sarge" of some description or is that just a nickname you gave yourself? Cuz people who give themselves nicknames are usually pretty silly.

The city's evac plan sucked. Do tell. And why do the poor people keep electing the corrupt, incompetent officials who thought up said sucked plan?

Why do people choose to live below sea level, generation after generation? Why do they later blame others for the consequences of their lazy, stupid decisions?

I think you'll find that a timeline of the Donner Party's misadventures puts the lie to your "in no time" assertion. And the fact that we still remember and revile the Donner Party indicates that the incident was rare and widely condemned to this day. Same with the Andes rugby team.

There was no cannibalism in New Orleans. However, those rumours were started by locals themselves. Can you explain why locals made up out of whole cloth weird stories about raped babies and bodies in freezers, and broadcast them around the world?

Sounds way more pathological to me than truly desperate folks scraping a bit of frozen flesh off a long dead commrade, and hating themselves forever for doing so.

There is something truly wrong with a large population of people for whom criminal behaviour is acceptable, corruption is greeted with a lazy shrug, anti-social behaviour is applauded (not to mention the very first thing they turn to in a crisis, rather than helping their neighbours).

What really upsets them is that finally the rest of the world got to see the way these people lived day to day, just on a grander scale. They're embarrassed that people in the outside world saw how helpless, foolish, selfish and idiotic they were.

It's like someone taking pictures of your dirty house and printing them on the front page of the paper, times one million.

Except a normal person would be embarrassed and say: Oh God, I have to clean my house. I really am a disgrace.

New Orleans people said: George Bush made my house messy. Then went back to live in the messy house and liked it.

Sick.

Tito adds:

I myself have been in a horrendous hurricane while growing up in Hawaii and my experience of it was vastly different from the what happened in New Orleans. Simply, I am disgusted at the way the people of New Orleans dealt with their circumstances as well as the media hype that followed.

I'd like to see the people of New Orleans deal with the aftermath of my experience where most of the residents of Kauai didn't have a home with a roof, no running water, and electricity for weeks if not months. None of us complained, none of us ran up to tv news trucks at every opportunity (in fact, there were barely any coverage at all), and there were no rapes, shootings, deaths, or any other type of malcontent activities.

We treated each other as Christians and went about reconstruction with barely a whisper being mentioned about Hurricane Iwa after it hit. That's my diatribe for the day.

(...)

Kauai was not completely rebuilt until 2004. 23 years after the fact.

Did we complain, yes, but not to the extent where a B-level movie producer made a propaganda piece that Joseph Goebbels would have been proud of.

No.

I am disgusted with how the people of New Orleans dealt with their circumstances. I pray for them to be able to move on.

More on Little Mosque on the Prairie

2007-01-06T11:32:00.000-05:00

It doesn't air until Tuesday night. This is a Globe advance piece:

In Little Mosque, for instance, a scruffy, overalls-wearing local named Joe stumbles into the mosque to find so-called scary Muslims bowing to pray. Joe rushes to call the 'terrorist-attack hotline,' just like he's seen done on CNN.

When the more tolerant Anglican priest tells Joe there's nothing 'sinister' about his Muslim neighbour's commercial real-estate company, Joe is unconvinced, pointing out that 'Osama bin Laden ran a construction company, too.'

How exactly does one "stumble" into a mosque? Can I get that hotline number? Note the dhimmi Anglican priest, btw.

When Bruce Lee co-starred in The Green Hornet tv series, as the Hornet's sidekick Kato, fans in Hong Kong called it the Kato Show. Maybe we could call LIttle Mosque the Joe Show...

It's a really bad sign that the hijab-wearing creator of this program is a Ryerson journalism grad. She may not be a total write-off, however.

The germ of the idea for Little Mosque started several years ago, after Nawaz locked horns with several more conservative male members of her Regina mosque. After many years of praying with the men, she walked in one day to find a curtain had been strung, separating the sexes, because the men found women “too distracting.”

Rather than get mad, Nawaz — who had completed several comedic film shorts — made a National Film Board documentary, called Me and the Mosque. “It was about how women feel about mosques,” she explains. “I was pretty sure all the gender discrimination these men talk about doesn't come from the faith, but from a cultural interpretation of the faith, and from patriarchy.

So will that incident end up in the sitcom, too?

This could be good

2007-01-05T15:26:00.000-05:00

And by good, I mean awful. Tonight Drive-In Classics is airing The Girl, the Body and the Pill (1967). No idea it was by grindhouse guru Herschell Gordon Lewis.

Sounds like an intriguing, possibly slightly infuriating, period curio .

"Oh, don't let the size of that little pill fool ya, it's like a hydrogen bomb, exploding in the face of civilization!"

So baby monkies hugging toy ducks is bad because...?

2007-01-05T13:35:00.000-05:00

Not sure what Drudge is driving at, choosing this photo to accompany the headline WARM WEATHER WREAKS HAVOC.

"Wreaks havoc" now apparently means "makes cutsie poo poo beebee munkees hug day little beebee duckie boo boos xoxox".

Which no sane person could possibly oppose.

Yes!

2007-01-05T07:46:00.000-05:00

So I finished writing this , in time to catch Steve Doocy on Fox & Friends ask a pair of Colorado farmers, whose cattle are stranded in the snow: "So has anybody out there applied for a FEMA trailer yet? Getting any $2,000 cash cards...?" to the hearty laughter of his interviewees.

UPDATE: SDA commenter shares a message from Denver (maybe this is where Doocy got the idea?):

WEATHER BULLETIN

Up here, in the "Mile-Hi City", we just recovered from a Historic event--- may I even say a "Weather Event" of "Biblical Proportions" --- with a historic blizzard of up to 44" inches of snow and winds to 90 MPH that broke trees in half, knocked down utility poles, stranded hundreds of motorists in lethal snow banks, closed ALL roads, isolated scores of communities and cut power to 10's of thousands.

FYI:

George Bush did not come.

FEMA did nothing.

No one howled for the government.

No one blamed the government.

No one even uttered an expletive on TV.

Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton did not visit.

Our Mayor did not blame Bush or anyone else.

Our Governor did not blame Bush or anyone else, either.

CNN, ABC, CBS, FOX or NBC did not visit -- or report on this category 5 snowstorm.

Nobody demanded $2,000 debit cards.

No one asked for a FEMA Trailer House.

No one looted.

Nobody -- I mean Nobody demanded the government do something.

Nobody expected the government to do anything, either.

No Larry King, No Bill O'Rielly, No Oprah, No Chris Mathews and No
Geraldo Rivera.

No Shaun Penn, No Barbara Striesand, No Hollywood types to be found.

Nope, we just melted the snow for water.

Sent out caravans of SUV's to pluck people out of snow engulfed cars.

The truck drivers pulled people out of snow banks and didn't ask for a
penny.

Local restaurants made food and the police and fire departments delivered it to the snowbound families.

Families took in the stranded people -- total strangers.

We fired up wood stoves, broke out coal oil lanterns or Coleman lanterns.

We put on extra layers of clothes because up here it is "Work or Die".

We did not wait for some affirmative action government to get us out of a mess created by being immobilized by a welfare program that trades votes for 'sittin at home' checks.

Even though a Category "5" blizzard of this scale has never fallen this early, we know it can happen and how to deal with it ourselves.

In my many travels, I have noticed that once one gets north of about 48 degrees North Latitude, 90% of the world's social problems evaporate.*

It does seem that way, at least to me.

I hope this gets passed on.

Maybe SOME people will get the message. The world does Not owe you a living.

***

* Dude's never been to Canada...

Can I just add here:

Nobody, presumably, blamed global warming, either.

My second prediction for 2007

2007-01-05T07:06:00.000-05:00

Some relative will sue because another relative got to be Designated Family Spokesperson during a kidnapping/stranded mountain climber/dead blonde (media) crisis, and he missed out on his time in the spotlight.

Yes, Little Mosque on the Prairie is a real Canadian sitcom

2007-01-05T06:23:00.000-05:00

I haven't blogged about it because I haven't seen an episode -- it hasn't formally debuted yet. It sounds goofy but a cringe-inducing concept or title does not a bad project make (I've seen The 40-Year-Old Virgin three times now and could easily watch it again -- funny-cuz-it's-true reflections on sex, work and race, not to mention a sweet, sound morality tale.)

RightGirl is blogging about Little Mosque on the Prairie, though. And yes, if it turns out the CBC is using my money to fund "hate whitey!" propaganda, I'll be vocal about it, too.

Times have changed and now the poor get fat

2007-01-05T05:52:00.000-05:00

"Now I’m about to say something that most of us think, but dare not express. Many times, when you give, you wonder if the recipients really appreciate it or deserve it. I remember about six years ago our family was matched with another for Christmas. When we arrived, struggling with ten bags of groceries and presents for the children, this particular family was watching a large screen TV on what looked like brand new furniture. We were still using hand-me-downs, and our TV didn’t work at the time. My six-year-old looked around and asked if next year, we could get on the list."

***
Poor people in Toronto aren't really poor. They have lots of stuff, first of all. Second, they're clearly not missing any meals. What they don't have is a job, or a very good one, or a legal one, so they fit some social worker's old timey criteria of "poor".

They don't have a (good) job because they dropped out of high school, had a baby, got into petty or not so petty crime. They're lazy, or ambitious-but-undisciplined, have treatable mental illnesses for which they remain stubbornly unmedicated, or have unrealistic/paranoid ideas about how the real world works. When those unrealistic/paranoid ideas bump up against reality, rather than acknowledge they were mistaken and change, poor people just become resentful, confused and even more inert.

They don't know how to manage money, and spend what they have gambling, on dollar store junk or in clubs. Notions of discipline or delayed gratification escape them. That's why my family was poor, except for the crime part. And my grandmother knew how to save money.

I studied them very, very carefully, did the exact opposite, and am not poor.

That's why I didn't donate to any Hurricane Katrina funds: I knew what would happen to the money, especially in the hands of people so dim that they live below sea level, so stoned they can't shift themselves to safety, and for whom cheating and corruption are part of the "colourful" local culture. I said people would spend donated money on strippers, lottery tickets and crack and I was right.

Misplaced sympathy and white guilt = higher taxes for the foreseeable future:

American tax dollars should not be spent on building homes in a bowl, 20 feet below sea level, in a city that shouldn't even exist anymore because it's so prone to hurricanes. Oh, but it would be "unfair" to make people move to an area where their whole home won't end up under water if there's a hurricane...

Let's revive the Victorian notion of the Deserving Poor.

And so it ends...

2007-01-05T05:35:00.000-05:00

Before Elvis could leave the building, he had to go to Vegas in the first place. With this, blogging strides onto the International stage, wearing a white rhinestone jumpsuit its Tupelo self would've jeered:

"As president of the Media Bloggers Association, Cox is about to unveil new membership policies designed to help bloggers who see themselves more as journalists than freeform diarists. (...) Among the planned criteria: Members would have to take an online course offered by the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank, covering legal issues related to blogging.

"Members also could seek credentialed status by undergoing training or demonstrating other work as professional journalists. They also must agree to the organization's ethical standards and adopt formal editorial and corrections policies. Doing so could give them the backing they need to obtain review copies of books and access to newsmakers and events, Cox said."

But more, much more than this...

This blog will be seven years old this summer. I have outlived plenty of my critics and copycats, and will outlive the Media Bloggers Association and its cornball careerism. Truly talented people don't need "credentials" and courses and "formal policies" -- actually, we do better without them. Only a mediocre dimwit would sign on for this crap.

Which means the Association will have plenty of takers.

PS: There's plenty wrong with blogging: the fanboy kiss-assery; the me-too-ism; the wholesale adoption of clunky, unimaginative catch-phrases; the military "experts" whose firsthand experience under fire amounts to having yelled "You sunk my battleship" at their cousin in the rec room; the blogs that are nothing more than too-eager auditions for party hack employment; the rush to denounce unseen movies, unread books -- and to publicize outrageous incidents that turn out to be figments of someone else's imagination.

None of those real problems can, should or will be solved by some stuck up, dues-collecting, members-only acronym.

"Thy Name is Charlie": the (well, not really) spirituality of Charlie's Angels

2007-01-04T19:53:00.000-05:00

"In the TV show there is NO point of identification in the diegisis-- In the TV show no girl ever hooks up with a guy -- they're detectives and this is business. They are devoted to only one man, Charlie, whose face we never see, and so we never have to form an opinion on him, resent his success or envy him or aspire to be like him in the Hugh Hefner vein/

"Also, there is rarely if any sexual harrassment, or suggestions of rape. Even when the angels are jailed and sent to work in a whorehouse they manage to avoid having to actually sleep with anyone. Thus as a young male viewer there is no anxiety over our perceived inability to defend them against our own sex.

(...)

"While Charlie remains unseen, the show stays in a perpetual pre-sexual twilight zone. The girls are all basically nuns in this regard, with Charlie as Christ. They are devoted to him--as an ideal of manhood in the abstract -- he is always kind, assured, generous, ontop of things, displaying wealth and a sense of cool, like James Bond wih a Blofeld style set-up. If the angels could only see his face, they'd be in heaven -- but then also they would be disillusioned, they'd become drug addicted prostitutes..."

Pot makes you stupid and lazy

2007-01-04T19:40:00.000-05:00

You already knew that, but Udolpho says it so much better:

Do we really need more boring, listless, unmotivated people in the world? Do we need more vacant stoners sitting around playing video games and watching the Home Shopping Network?

(...)

"Potheads love to compare their drug to alcohol, too, like this automatically makes them less repellent, even though almost all of them drink as well. Never mind that, it's pothead logic.Most people who drink outside a reservation can handle it...

(...)

"And while alcohol has given us the alcoholic parent and, even worse, the child of the alcoholic parent, plus millions of car accidents, marijuana has given us hippies and jazz musicians and I submit to you that that is far worse."

Steve Sailer just comes right out and says stuff

2007-01-04T19:36:00.000-05:00

"Something I noticed after a number of visits to D.C. is how much white Washingtonians prefer African immigrants to American blacks. One reason is because on average the African blacks are much more obsequious toward whites than the American blacks of Washington D.C., who are far more surly and slow-moving than the American blacks in, say, Chicago.

"The African-American checkout ladies at CVS drugstores always remind me of John F. Kennedy's saying that Washington D.C. combines Southern efficiency with Northern charm. The African immigrants, in contrast, are much more polite and thus make more desirable servants for our ruling elite. Some of this white preference for Africans rubs off on Obama."

Sure, Derb's cracking up -- but it's fun to watch

2007-01-04T13:12:00.000-05:00

"The family are Mormons, but this sniveling, groveling, all-forgiving attitude towards evil-doers is very Christian. It has always been present to some degree in our majority national religion -— it is endorsed in the New Testament, after all! —- but it seems to be more and more prominent. The older, more robust American tradition —- hang him first, pray for him later -— seems to be slipping away. It's enough to drive one to Nietzsche."

(...)

Here, in a major American city, was a huge mass of poor people, almost entirely black, gleefully looting stores when they might have been helping themselves and their neighbors —-- clueless, under-socialized, waiting passively for the government to come and help them."

(...)

"... and a US upper-middle class that would much rather have cheerful small brown people mowing its lawns and watching its kids, than large surly black people, even though the black people are our fellow citizens, with American ancestry going back, in many cases, further than ours; while the brown people are foreigners."

"Otherwise known to his friends as 'Victor Davis Hanson'"

2007-01-04T12:35:00.000-05:00

And Solway (or his editor) obviously meant to write Why I Am Not a Muslim (the Christian title being Bertrand Russell's -- sheesh, remember him? -- tatty old talisman of teen boys everywhere.)

But congratulations to Books in Canada for daring to publish this otherwise perceptive review of America Alone. I'm shocked they had the nerve. No doubt cancelled subscriptions will follow -- presuming Books in Canada still has subscribers to speak of...

We live in a time in which everything is fraught with danger, especially clear speech, which has the resented end of perforating the make-believe world we persist in inhabiting. As I have mentioned, Steyn deploys a direct, barbed, and acerbic language which provokes discomfort as it punctures the cherished clichés and rosy scenarios by which we run our lives, and therefore the truths he articulates must be dismissed by our teeming cadres of intellectual softies as mere "rant", as "crass and vulgar."

In effect, he seems increasingly to be regarded by the punditry of the Left as some sort of Dr. FrankenSteyn, assembling his monstrous progeny in the garish laboratory of a deranged mind. But in attempting to marginalise him, they insulate themselves against the power of his critical analysis of the contemporary nanny state and the stark predicament of post-Enlightenment modernity.

"I was racially profiled -- and I don't care"

2007-01-04T07:01:00.000-05:00

"When you arrive at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, you have to go through some intense questioning before being let into Israel. When you have a last name like Daifallah, that questioning is even more pointed..."

Who's behind (somewhat amusing) Brit Hume adultery rumours?

2007-01-04T06:32:00.000-05:00

I'm posting this for purely educational reasons.

"For months, a rumor has been circulating among TV news insiders in Washington, D.C., and New York that Brit Hume, Fox News Channel's managing editor in Washington and host of prime-time hour Special Report, has been having an extramarital affair with a younger colleague. The object of his alleged attentions: Megyn Kendall, a general-assignment correspondent who has been with the network since 2004.

(...)

"One Fox source said Hume seemed genuinely amused and somewhat flattered to be linked by gossip to the attractive and much younger Kendall.) A Fox spokesperson also flatly denied it, and suggested it was being 'shopped around' by enemies of the network.

"And while that might sound like paranoia, at least one such enemy does exist: publicist Paul Schur, a former Fox spokesman whose job it was to burnish Hume's image just months ago.

(...)

"Radar was alerted to the Wikipedia entry by an anonymous e-mail sent in late December. Wikipedia keeps track of the IP address of each user who changes an entry; when Radar became suspicious that Schur was behind the change to Kendall's entry, a reporter sent him an e-mail with a link to a website maintained by a Radar staffer. When Schur visited the site, his computer's IP address was logged by the site's tracking software, and it matched the IP address of the Wikipedia user that inserted the rumor in Kendall's entry. (The offending sentence has since been deleted.)"

(...)

"As for Kendall, it's safe to say that if she has unprofessional feelings to conceal, she's not doing a very good job of it. When, in a July interview with FishbowlDC, she was asked to name her favorite working journalist, she said, 'Brit Hume. The man truly knows everything about everything.'

"Later, in the same Q&A, Kendall was asked which of the seven deadly sins she most resembled. She answered, 'Lust.'"

Charles Colson on America Alone

2007-01-04T06:29:00.000-05:00

"Prisoners all share one thing: a need for something to fill the emptiness in their lives. We have seen this in the thousands of prisons we work in. Radical Islamists know this, and they have made a point of targeting prisoners for conversion. Their brand of religion offers people that sense of belonging, of something worth living and dying for, that people need — the very thing that postmodern secular societies do not offer. And that’s a big part of what makes radical Islam so dangerous.

"As Steyn put it in a recent interview for our BreakPoint website, '[Radical] Islam is a weak enemy, and its strength is determined by what it’s pushing against.' The problem is that Europe and, increasingly, America are putting up very little resistance. If Christians won’t stand up for our worldview, and secularists won’t stand up for anything, one day we may have no one but ourselves to blame for the triumph of radical Islam. The greatest offense against aggressive Islam is a strong, vibrant Christian faith, which, of course, comes right down to you and me."

Nice words about my poetry collection

2007-01-04T06:15:00.000-05:00

Thanks, John!

And yes: the Frida Kahlo Thing was just developing when I wrote that poem, sometime around 1993, I'd guess (the book took about 4 years to find a publisher).

Funny... Canadian news stories left out that bit...

2007-01-04T06:01:00.000-05:00

"A spokesman for Simon Fraser [University in Vancouver] said the two crosses on the 40-year-old emblem are a problem. Warren Gill, the school's vice-president of university relations, said the school doesn't want people to think the wrong thing.

"At virtually the same time, the school announced that was creating a center for the study of Muslim issues. It is being funded by $1 million from the Amin Lalji family and $250,000 from school Board of Governors chair Saida Rasul and her husband Firoz."

But it's Thomas Jefferson's Koran!

2007-01-04T05:38:00.000-05:00

"This is allegedly a political masterstroke by Ellison, but it really just begs the question. Thomas Jefferson, obviously, was not a Muslim. In his famous statement on religious freedom he wrote about whether one's neighbor believed in one god or twelve 'neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.' But what no one is willing to discuss here is whether the Qur'an and Islam really fit into that framework. When I have mentioned that it sanctions lying to unbelievers (3:28 and 16:106, in the mainstream understanding of those verses by Islamic theologians and schools of jurisprudence; cf. Ibn Kathir and many others), people have responded that the Bible is full of nasty stuff as well.

"But people aren't swearing on the Bible because it is full of nasty stuff, or endorsing any of it that might actually be there. The idea of swearing on the Bible arises from Christian belief and is buttressed by Christian theology -- Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant -- that requires honesty and eschews all dishonesty as coming from the 'Father of Lies.' The permissions to be dishonest in the Qur'an are not mitigated by Islamic belief, tradition, and theology, but are in fact reinforced -- by Muhammad's statements that "war is deceit" and that lying is permissible in wartime, and more."

Do NOT let your children go to college

2007-01-03T06:54:00.000-05:00

"On H-Slavery, inquiries about the popular notion that slaves made quilts encoded with signals about the 'underground railroad' appear with some regularity. In late 2005, a faculty member in Communications at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, inquired about it on behalf of an MA student. 'He's discovering an inherent problem with the project: the lack of primary research materials...'

"This faculty member was told -- in fairly clear terms -- that the quilt/code myth was just that -– that the reason his student was having trouble finding primary sources was not that they had disintegrated but that they hadn't been used in that way. Yet, the UNLV faculty member, Donovan Conley, ignored the advice of historians, such as David Blight, and allowed his student, Theodore Ransaw, to perpetuate the quilt/code myth in a thesis, 'Point of Contact: Nineteenth Century Visual Rhetoric of the Underground Railroad.' Ransaw has also published a book called The Sexual Secrets of Cleopatra: The Wisdom of the Ancient Egyptians, 'which asserts among other things that Viking culture came from Egypt, the Pope wears a pharaoh's hat, and that yoga and tai chi spread to China from Africa.'

"It isn't clear to me that public ownership of historic properties is any guarantee of historical integrity, if professors at public institutions foster and credential nonsense."

"Obama is a wigger"

2007-01-03T06:42:00.000-05:00

"He's a remarkably exotic variety of the faux African-American, but a wigger nonetheless. He has no ancestors who were slaves in the U.S. Moreover, his upbringing by his white mother and Indonesian stepfather in Indonesia and by his white grandparents in Hawaii, where mixed-race children are close to the norm, was almost wholly divorced from African-American life … except for what he could see and aspire to on TV."

(...)

"...many whites want to be able to say, 'I'm not one of them, those bad whites, like that guy on Seinfeld. Hey, I voted for a black guy for President!'

"Plus, I suspect there's an even more hidden reason many whites wish Obama is elected President: They hope that when a black finally moves into the White House, it will prove to African-Americans, once and for all, that white animus isn't the cause of their troubles. All blacks have to do is to act like President Obama — and their problems will be over!

"It's a seductive vision. And it plays right into our national dream that race is just skin deep, that it's all in our heads, that the solution for all racial conflict is simply thinking right thoughts, etc. etc.

"Of course, electing Obama President won't actually have that effect on black behavior — any more than electing Tom Bradley mayor of Los Angeles for five terms in a row from 1973-1993 prevented black rioters from burning down much of the city's commercial districts in 1992.

"The unfortunate reality: there is no panacea for race. The roots of racial differences in America stretch far back into the history and prehistory of other continents. Symbolic gestures won't make them go away."

Thanks for all your blog platform suggestions

2007-01-03T06:23:00.000-05:00

RE: yesterday's post. Thanks for sharing your experiences with WordPress, MT, etc. I'm exploring all my options. Do keep sending your suggestions to kshaidle-AT-rogers.com.

Religion Newswriters Association: call for entries

2007-01-03T06:19:00.000-05:00

The Religion Newswriters Association invites journalists to enter its contests recognizing religion reporting excellence in the news media. More than $14,000 in prizes are awarded in nine contest categories.

Visit RNA.org for entry forms and more information. Postmark deadline: Feb. 1, 2007 (Chandler student contest deadline is May 1, 2007).

Who told you to come here in the first place?

2007-01-03T06:07:00.000-05:00

"I had to read through the article more than once to realize that there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing to China going on. Huge amounts of money were being spent on plane tickets for mothers, grandmothers, children... wouldn't this money have been better spent on daycare?

"Or how about the community groups like St. Stephen's Community House? Why aren't they offering cheap or free daycare as a way to help immigrants get on their feet? Why does it always have to be the government? Why not other immigrants sharing each other's burdens and taking shifts with the kids?

(...)

"No, the problem is that the immigrants in question are coming from a strictly Communist regime to a highly socialized one, and they expect to get the same amount of services thay had under Communism, coupled with the benefits of a free society."

***
Here's the bit I don't understand: we're forever hearing about foreign doctors driving cabs because they can't get credentialed in Canada. (And probably for good reason: I don't want a "doctor" with a degree from Bangalor U., and whose English isn't good enough, isn't subtle enough, to understand my complaints.) Immigrants act so surprised and indignant about it.

We also all know that these people spend a small fortune on phone cards. They call and email the folks back home constantly. So why don't they tell other foreigners to stop coming here? Don't they tell their friends and family about this "unrecognized credentials" problem?

PS: is there anything we can do about people's accents? Lots of Asian immigrants speak English. But their accents make it almost impossible to understand what they're saying. When I've got some perfectly capable, educated Chinese guy trying to walk me through computer tech support or what have you, God help us both.

Canada's LifeSite exposes NYT abortion fibs

2007-01-03T06:02:00.000-05:00

"The sensational piece alleged that women there had been thrown in prison for 30-year terms for having had abortions. Hitt described his visit to one of them, inmate Carmen Climaco. 'She is now 26 years old, four years into her 30-year sentence' for aborting an 18-week-old fetus.

"Cruel. Horrible. Outrageous. And utterly, demonstrably, false. Climaco had actually been convicted of murder for strangling her newborn baby.

"Lifesite first exposed the truth after easily obtaining court documents in the case. Calame followed up and also independently obtained the documents easily — records which Hitt didn't bother to try and get for himself to verify the propaganda being fed to him."

(...)

"The Times' pro-abortion poster child is a woman convicted of infanticide. But the Times, questioned by its own public editor, refuses to acknowledge Jack Hitt's false reporting."

"Just heard: new term for 'hooker' on state-run media"

2007-01-03T05:50:00.000-05:00

"Just heard: on the liberal-leftists’ state-run media’s 'Newsworld' channel (...) 'news' anchor Sarika Sehgal tossed a story on murdered prostitutes (whom she called 'sex trade workers') to a field 'reporter' named Kim Trynacity, who went ahead and took it a step further and 'progressed' the term to 'street-trade workers,' eliminating the word 'sex' altogether. Again, that’s 'street-trade workers.'

"Next year at this time, they will be called 'fellatio professionals' and state-run universities will offer degree programs...."

Best news of the month: Rick McGinnis blogging again

2007-01-02T18:40:00.000-05:00

Canada's Lileks makes his triumphant post-"Boomer Deathwatch" return to the 'sphere with Life with Father." He introduces himself:

I'm a dad in my forties with two daughters, a conservative catholic, a professional photographer, tv and movie critic, and ten years ago i would have told you that this was impossible. then i would have taken a swing at you. i might have been drunk. i look nothing like william powell.

Some guy says Mark Steyn can't write, is "not hot"

2007-01-02T15:44:00.000-05:00

Jeff Mahoney (who?) at the Hamilton Spectator (snort!) "writes": Neo-Cons aren't "hot" anymore.

Now, ladies: put those safetys back on. Jeff means we're newly tepid zeitgeist-wise. That Steyn tops all your secret private "[Censored]: Pundits Category" naughty lists is a no-guffer, maybe even to Jeff.

(And yeah, male readers: that is what we crypto-fascist chicks talk about when you're all away, keeping The Patriarchy, Inc. humming along. Sorry. Or -- depending on who's reading this -- congratulations!)

But wait: Jeff has seen our secret list after all! Jeff's eyeballs need plucking, pronto!

Amazing breakout fact: Among neocon women, David Frum is actually considered "hot." Amazing, because David Frum looks like Jimmy Kimmel in one of Kissinger's old suits. But compared to Newt Gingrich, he's Pierce Brosnan. End of amazing breakout fact.

As regular readers know, I agree that Newt Gingrich is multi-level disturbing, beginning with his name, which doesn't lend itself to ecstatic panting. But David Frum hardly rates not one but two sarcastic "amazing"s. Jimmy Kimmel is kinda cute, and Kissinger's suits were probably Saville Row bespokes. Meanwhile, ten bucks says Jeff was wearing stained Costco track pants while he wrote this column. Or, if it was laundry day, his old Speedo swim trunks...

Anyway, Jeff traces the Collapse of the Neo-Con Era to... Dick Cheney's hunting accident, which everyone else, including the guy who got his face blasted off, had totally forgotten about.

This confirmed for many people what they long suspected: Cheney lives on a large game preserve, much like the island of Dr. Moreau, where he hunts human quarry for amusement and cackles malevolently.

Again, Jeff's point rather escapes me. (See: "[Censored]: Office Holders", above, or just this.) That's Actual Humo(u)r Writing (tm), by the way, Jeff, unlike your flaccid attempt here:

Breakout fact about neoconservatism: Of all the political movements that began in the 20th century, it has the worst dancers, worse even than the old Socreds -- and that's goin' a ways. Even the women don't dance well. Ann Coulter can't dance at all; she has to be strapped to a gurney with a barred face mask on her head like Hannibal Lecter.

Her life is just one long Michael Richards moment. In a pinch neocons will shyly do the chicken dance thing with their arms. Or the Macarena, but they can never get the part right where they have to wiggle their bums. End of interesting neocon fact breakout.

How does Jeff know Coulter can't dance, anyway? Is he still mad because she laughed in his face that night at the prom? Or was that another girl? Lots and lots of other girls? I vote yes.

Here's more of Jeff's immortal prose:

Donald Rumsfeld crashed through the war this year like Tonya Harding trying to smash even her own knees.

Nope, me either.

And yet, Jeff girl-fully insists:

There's not a writer on the right -- Mark Steyn? Give us a break -- nor has there been in quite a time, who can touch Garrison Keillor, Al Franken or Maureen Dowd, for humour or bite. Neocon writers tend to have one joke. And one stale voice -- sophomore snide -- their prose as hollow, un-Orwellian and insubstantial as their gas-filled ideology.

So writeth the great Jeff Mahoney, whose own prose stylings have been variously described as "workmanlike" and "merely adequate" by some of the finest adult education instructors in Ontario.

Check it out, ladies: Jeff even puts his phone number at the bottom of his column. Heh.

Enjoy the brief moment of fame this post permits you, Jeff. It'll be your last.

Dear Blogger: fix my RSS feed in 24 hours or else

2007-01-02T13:55:00.000-05:00

Dear Blogger:

I'd hate to dump you guys after 6 relatively happy years but I will soon have no choice. My blog's rss feed disappeared after I moved from the old blogger.

I am losing traffic, revenue and credibility.

Blogger has until 2PM EST tomorrow (Wednesday Jan 3, 2007) to give me a working fix for my RSS feed or I am switching. I am already asking my readers to weigh in on the relative merits of MT and other platforms.

***
So, my readers: where do you blog and why? Sell me: kshaidle-AT-rogers.com

Old v. new Star Treks

2007-01-02T06:34:00.000-05:00

for those who like that sort of thing. Key words: risk aversion...

The therapy-speak was the most annoying aspect of the new show. No one was allowed to simply be brave or adventurous or even rash -- everything had to be explained away according to whichever article in Psychology Today the episodes' writers had skimmed at the dentist's office. In the old misogynist days of Kirk and Spock, the character of Counselor Troi would have existed to have her complacently perfect psyche overset by a real emotion, usually expressed as a violent attraction to one of the major male crew members. And she usually would have ended up tragically killed (so as to leave the heroes free to go on adventuring), or simply never mentioned again, such as Scotty's lady love in "The Lights of Zetar." But in the later shows that wasn't allowed, and we couldn't get rid of her. (It is interesting that the women who often ended up meeting a bad end were the ones who were what we would have known in my childhood as "tomboys" -- "warrior" type women with "masculine" characteristics such as adventurousness, belligerence, and so on, and a marked lack of "nurturing" characteristics such as a tendency to talk about their and everyone else's emotions and feelings, unless it was feelings like "I'm going to beat up that Romulan!" -- characters such as Lieutenant Tasha Yar, who was played by Denise Crosby.)

Recall those refreshed opening credits: "To boldly go where noone has gone before!" Inclusive language for nerds.

PS:

It is really not that daring to suggest that the typical sci fi devotee is a socially awkward white male who prizes laborious detail of setting over literary quality. Hence the dominance of writers like Isaac Asimov and Frank Herbert and William Gibson, in whose entire output one will find not a single stirring passage or notable use of metaphor. And yet their fans must number in the millions.

My suspicions about any woman who announced a love of science fiction would be, in order:

1. Dumpy looking

2. Socially maladept

3. Resigned to grabbing the low hanging fruit of mating material

Rolling Stone rapped for "bad taste"

2007-01-02T06:18:00.000-05:00

Hey, no making fun of poor Saddam Hussein, dudes!

From a journalistic stand-point, for a publication with the historical significance of RS to post something like this is really an embarrassing sign of the times…Essentially, you are mocking the life-works of artists like Bob Dylan and John Lennon who represent your audience.

Via RightWingTrash, who also posts his Top Ten Films of 2006.

Speaking of movies, reader Joe weighs in on 1965's The War Lord (mentioned here yesterday):

The War Lord is a surprisingly good account of an eleventh-century Norman knight who has received his reward for a lifetime of hard service: a godforesaken fief on the northern march; a land of sullen, semi-pagan peasants, and marauding Frisians. The story goes a bit soapi-sh in the middle, but Heston and Richard Boone, as his laconic retainer, are excellent. The movie offers a much more realistic view of the time than one usually finds on film. Overall, The War Lord is well worth seeing.

I tried to use it in class when teaching western civ, but prints used to be hard to come by.

Thanks!

Whatever they're paying Kinsella, it's too much

2007-01-02T05:51:00.000-05:00

"Happy New Year -- unless you are in an emo band, or you own one of the Post's competitors. In which case, I do not wish your 2007 to be all that terrific."

Yep, Cretien's cabin boy keeps those old lips fully pursed at all times -- doesn't that hurt after a while? Next book: Kissing Ass in Canadian Politics

Again with the "blogging" -- from the nation's expert, dontcha know. Emo? The environment? Osama? Warren: they asked you for predictions for 2007, not 2001.

I'm not one for "New Year predictions", not being a hack & all. Last year I sensed an ELO revival and sure enough their music showed up in a Workopolis ad and on a few movie soundtracks. Today? "Hand lifts" will become the new plastic surgery must-have, as boomers notice that their wrinkled hands don't match their yoga-fied bods.

See, when you have nothing much to say, just say nothing. So much more dignified...

Incredible -- artsy leftist scolds another: "Bush not Hitler"

2007-01-01T15:42:00.000-05:00

"Sorry, Dave and Graham, but the occupation of West Berlin by the U.S. (and Great Britain and France) did not make life 'all the worse' for the poor Germans and their 'shattered psyches.' The Soviets, understandably pissed off that the Germans had invaded their country and killed, oh, about 15 million people, came through Germany like the plague, slaughtering every German soldier they could find and raping, oh, about a million women.

"It was Soviet guns that pounded Berlin into a 'labyrinthine necropolis' (classy verbiage, Graham!). Occupation by the western nations was the best break the Germans ever got. Yeah, George Bush is a liar, an incompetent, a pathetic frat boy with an incurable taste for torture, but he’s no Hitler, and no Stalin. Even a film critic should be able to tell the difference."

***
Hmmm. Maybe this fellow will even cough up something like this, forty years hence:

Now, at this moment in New Jersey, I come to a conclusion about my actions as a young man when Vietnam was a dirty word to me. I wish I'd led a platoon of Marines in Vietnam. I would like to think I would have trained my troops well and that the Viet Cong would have had their hands full if they entered a firefight with us. From the day of my birth, I was programmed to enter the Marine Corps. I was the son of a Marine fighter pilot, and I had grown up on Marine bases where I had watched the men of the corps perform simulated war games in the forests of my childhood.

That a novelist and poet bloomed darkly in the house of Santini strikes me as a remarkable irony. My mother and father had raised me to be an Al Kroboth, and during the Vietnam era they watched in horror as I metamorphosed into another breed of fanatic entirely. I understand now that I should have protested the war after my return from Vietnam, after I had done my duty for my country. I have come to a conclusion about my country that I knew then in my bones but lacked the courage to act on: America is good enough to die for even when she is wrong.

"The only anti-Communist Sci-Fi religious movie ever made"

2007-01-01T12:27:00.001-05:00

Red Planet Mars (1952) airs at 2PM EST, on TCM today.

If you happen upon an online critique of this film that doesn't contain the words "paranoia" and/or "hysteria", do let me know. All the essays I could find were snotty, ill-informed anti-Christian screeds.

It's Charleton Heston Month at Eccentric Cinema

2007-01-01T11:19:00.000-05:00

Throughout the month they'll be adding reviews of Heston's most famous films, like Soylent Green and Airport 1975. For now, they're looking at some forgotten feudal fight film called The War Lord and, of course, Planet of the Apes.

Dr. Salim Mansur: a Canadian, and a Muslim, who gets it

2007-01-01T11:11:00.000-05:00

"The current enemy is the outcrop of a broken civilization of the past, spewing forth from its rotting bowels an endless horde of militants and fellow-travellers, carrying with them the most atavistic ideas about faith and politics that modern civilization, which Bush represents, hesitates to name for what it is.

(...)

"Those who endlessly fault Bush for the shape of the world visible since 9/11, will one day cry a river if he and his successors fail to save civilization from its present-day enemies.

"Michael Novak, a Catholic theologian and philosopher, named Bush 'the bravest president' for staying firm in confronting the contemporary barbarians, despite the venom of his peers.

"In the dark winter nights, some of us will have prayers for Bush, knowing the difference between what he represents and those who would prey upon civilization."

Canada now slightly more bearable

2006-12-31T13:33:00.000-05:00

since Rogers Cable is giving us a free preview of Turner Classic Movies. Obviously I'll be signing up when the preview ends, the Saturday Night "Underground" program with Rob Zombie being the main reason.

I already own Foxy Brown but they're also running Coffy next weekend. Coffy features Grier's notorious "razor blade in the Afro" bit, surpassed later in Foxy Brown, where she picks a loose blade up from a bedside table with her tongue then cuts through her bindings. Charlie Chaplin only wishes he'd thought up that bit... Like a black Marlene Dietrich, Grier isn't much of an actress but what do you care?

Strangely, the TCM essay on Foxy Brown heaps praise on Peter Brown's hammy sliminess, while completely ignoring Katherine Loder's just-under-iconic turn as one of the great homely women in cinema, villain Kathryn Wall.

And yes, young idiots: that is "Captain Spaulding" as the pilot.

Both movies were made by a white guy. Make of that what you will.

Dave Barry still alive, funny

2006-12-31T11:16:00.000-05:00

"Internationally, the big news comes from Denmark, center of a mounting furor over some cartoons, published the previous year in a Danish newspaper, which depict a prophet whom, in the interest of not offending anybody, we will refer to as Fohammed. This upsets several million of the prophet’s followers, who request a formal apology from the newspaper, greater sensitivity to their religious beliefs, and, where necessary, beheadings. Eventually everybody realizes that the whole darned thing was just a silly misunderstanding."

Also via Tim Blair, tangentially: palpable excitement, er, mounts, as non-anorexic, tattoo-free woman whose breasts appear to be real and whose thighs are larger than 8" in circumference is discovered on the internet. And it's all in aid of the war effort, should your wife complain.

RSS feed still busted

2006-12-30T13:27:00.000-05:00

since my move to the new Blogger. Blogger Help hasn't been much, well, help. I've also asked Feedburner if they know what I can do.

Meanwhile, my traffic is down by a few hundred uniques each day and I'm none too happy about that. I appreciate you coming by without that handy automatic prompt. Thanks for your loyalty!

Oh oh oh! Me me me!!

2006-12-29T05:47:00.000-05:00

Muslim World League wants lawsuits for "abuse of Islam and the Prophet."

"Jamal Badawi, a Canadian-Muslim expert on Islam, spoke about the Prophet’s outstanding influence on human history.

“'There is no other personality who has made such a positive impact on history,' he told the conference."

***
So who is this "Jamal Badawi", anyhoo? Check it out: "Dr. Jamal Badawi has been without doubt the best known Muslim speaker in the West for the last two decades." Nope, I never heard of him either.

Badawi messed with Spencer. Guess who lost.

Oh, this should be good:

In this series of interviews, originally aired on TV several years ago, Dr. Badawi delves into the various and numerous scientific & natural phenomena mentioned in the Holy Qur'an. These range from various stages of Human Reproduction Cycle to a host of Astrnomical,[sic] Zoological, Botanical and Geological phenomenon. Correlating these against modern scientific discoveres of only the past two centuries, Dr. Badawi highlights the miraculous and incredulous [I'll say!] nature of the Holy Qur'an.

No doubt he talks about stuff like this:

A possible cure for AIDS has been extracted from Prophetic tradition and tested with impressive results, claimed Dr. Husni Al-Goshae. This came in the first session of the Eighth International Conference on the Scientific Signs in the Qur'an and Sunnah...

Or this:

The greatest speed C, denoting the velocity of light in vacuum, is hinted at in two glorious Quranic verses relating this fundamental universal contant C with the motion of the Earth-Moon system. A new relativistic interpretation of this Quranic relation gives C=299792.5 km/s in an extremely marvellous agreement with the accepted international value. This astonishing result emphasises the unity of the physical world, the validity of the special theory of relativity and the authenticity of the Glorious Quran for unbelievers.

PS: without a hint of irony, these guys proudly list "Muslim Scientists and Thinkers" here. This list ends in the 14th Century.

Hey, even better: While us poor Jews and Christians have been, like, developing the theory of relativity, dude here's been real busy writing "How To Learn Journalism From the Noble Qur'an".

I'm reminded of the weird Muslim stuff I discovered online while researching "Dial-A-Fatwa":

A quick search of Islam Online's Fatwa Bank turns up rulings by numerous clerics, about "sneezing," "clapping," "fixing cats," "wearing colored contact lenses," "writing romance novels," and something called "continuous urination."

Those "sons of Allah" indeed!

Planned Parenthood continues desperate descent into irrelevance

2006-12-29T05:29:00.000-05:00

"Conceptually, the 'I ♥ EC' shirt echoes the V-Day 'Consent Is Sexy' button campaign. It's intended to present the wearer as a bold single woman taking charge of her life, but it really only shows her availability to men who seek sex sans responsibility. The message is, 'If you have sex with me, I'll make sure you have no child to support. If the EC doesn't work, I'll abort the little bugger. Nothing can get in the way of your having sex with me free from any consequences.'"

What James Brown really said to stop those riots

2006-12-28T18:48:00.000-05:00

"Brothers! My brothers!! If you're gonna beat each other up, 'least do it behind closed doors like I do. That way whitey won't see ya!"

And then he did the splits.

Enough with the "million little pieces" already -- just trim your toenails next time!

2006-12-28T15:22:00.000-05:00

Well, thank you, Tammy Bruce for linking to the 2006 "Bad Sex in Fiction" Awards.

Yes, that Auberon Waugh. Yes, that Courtney Love (whose chin looks eerily like her latent unformed twin in that photo...)

Why the "winner" "won", I don't know. Is "my bulging trousers" really so much more unforgivable than Pynchon's aborted teenie doggie oral thingie? (No, the dog wasn't a bloody, mangled pup with a coat hanger in its head -- you have to read it. Need I add you'll be sorry.)

Or Irvine Welsh's "thick green saliva/old Scottish lady" interlude?

Seems to me that Willocks was trying for "knowingly anachronistic/archaic," Mitchell for "adolescent p.o.v. with attendant limited vocabulary and frames of reference" -- so neither of these, er, entries really belongs on a "bad" list per se.

I'm not convinced Mark Haddon has actually slept with a woman, based soley on his contribution to this contest, so we really mustn't (sp?) laugh.

No, the winner should have been Will Self, simply for the phrase "Michelle was pleased that Dave wasn't repellent."

Great. Now everyone at the office wants to know why I'm laughing and I have to lie and say it's the description I'm writing for the KitchenAid stand mixer. Cuz Egmont Arens's name always cracks me up...

Do I even have to tell you that all but one of these entries was written by a man? I certainly don't mean because these are the "Bad Sex" awards -- I am a raging heterosexual, down to my rainbow-with-a-giant-X-through-it underpants. Or because every single one of these imaginary ladies miraculously survives a wallpaper-under-the-fingernails orgasm a mere minute into the procedings.

No, I mean because not once in any of the shortlisted entries will you see the word "Kleenex."

Michelle knows what I'm talking about.

(Only tangentially related: there's a very young Hindu girl getting married here, and she told us that the night before, all the other Hindu ladies come over and henna you from top to toe. They write your name somewhere in the ornate scroll design and your husband can't have sex with you until he finds it. And I actually managed not to say, "You know, Catholics have something like that, except we write "K-A-T..." in 6" letters using waterproof Sharpies. But what is this 'married' of which you speak?" Catholics: we're the Party Church!)

You know, reading these "Bad Sex in Fiction" entries makes me wonder what my mother really meant when she told me, with the utmost gravity, "Never, ever marry an Englishman..."

UPDATE: Wendy thinks I've been drinking. No, thank God, but really -- this post only makes sense if you steel yourself (as it were) and read the actual nominees for the Bad Sex Award (see link at the, er, top. Urgh. This is like talking funny for the rest of the day after you watch a Tennessee Williams movie -- now every other word seems like an "in-yer-end-o", as an ex-friend used to call 'em. Yes, I'll stop now.)

Hugh Hewitt: He looks like "Ralphie" in A Christmas Story...

2006-12-28T09:35:00.000-05:00

and in less than 5 minutes, he can make you his *****.

In other news: Lourdes marks 62,012th riot free day!

2006-12-28T06:32:00.000-05:00

RightGirl reminds us that all religions aren't quite the same:

"Last year, 360 people [in Mecca] were trampled to death (this never happens at the Vatican, even when hundreds of thousands showed up for the Pope John Paul II vigil and funeral). The year before, it was 250 (never happens at Lourdes). 1990 was an exciting year, when 1426 pilgrims were killed (I've never heard of this happening at the Temple Mount).

"The BBC keeps a gruesome tally here. Wiki has one here. Anyone want to place bets for this year?"

Scotland: increase in "race hate crimes" not really about "race"

2006-12-28T06:25:00.000-05:00

"Do Muslims in Britain and America really want to decrease fear and mistrust directed toward them? Easy. Just follow these four simple steps:

"Stop blaming violent acts committed by Muslims in the name of Islam on the various sins of unbelievers.

"Establish nationwide, compulsory programs in American mosques to teach against the jihad ideology and Islamic supremacism, by means including an explicit and definitive rejection of the literal meaning of many passages of Qur'an and Hadith.

"Stop saying violent or hateful things in private when you think no non-Muslims are around..."

Coulter updates her classic Kwanzaa column

2006-12-28T06:16:00.000-05:00

"Kwanzaa was the result of a '60s psychosis grafted onto the black community. Liberals have become so mesmerized by multicultural nonsense that they have forgotten the real history of Kwanzaa and Karenga's United Slaves -- the violence, the Marxism, the insanity. Most absurdly, for leftists anyway, is that they have forgotten the FBI's tacit encouragement of this murderous black nationalist cult founded by the father of Kwanzaa.

"Now the 'holiday' concocted by an FBI dupe is honored in a presidential proclamation and public schools across the nation. The only principle Kwanzaa promotes is liberals' unbounded capacity to respect any faith but Christianity."

My RSS feed isn't working

2006-12-27T21:16:00.000-05:00

since I switched to the new version of Blogger. I'm working on fixing this through the Blogger/Google help forums.

Thanks for letting me know, and for your patience while I try to fix this. Hope you'll remember to come back to this blog every day without the RSS promptings, at least for the next day or two.