If this doesn't end the box-office slump, nothing will

Reuters: "Madonna Says She May Try Directing Movies"

ThisClose

Ipsos-Reid says it's Liberals 31%, Conservatives 31%. And the Tories are just two points down in Ontario. (via Staples)

This is encouraging news, but with Conservative support largely concentrated in the West (ahead 64 to 17 in Alberta), we need to pull at least 4 or 5 points ahead of the Liberals for a shot at winning it all.

Jughead 3:16

I was absolutely obsessed with Archie comic books as a child, so much that I even remember the Christian versions produced by cartoonist Al Hartley in the seventies. Now, two of them - Archie's Parables and Archie's Date Book - are online (in PDF format).

What's really interesting is that the Christian Archie comics were produced under licence by Spire Christian Comics, but they weren't disowned by the Archie Comics Group. On the contrary, I remember explicitly religious stories appearing in these little Archie digests you could buy at the supermarket checkout, especially around Christmas time. Archie publishers Richard Goldwater and Michael Silberkleit were Jewish, but they considered Hartley's work wholesome enough for their characters.

Two other Spire comics I have to see: Tom Landry and the Dallas Cowboys, and Hello, I'm Johnny Cash.

Update: an excellent site about the history of Archie comics, including a special section on the Saturday-morning cartoon versions, can be found here.

Chutzpah

I think I speak for every Conservative when I say the two Liberal MPs I most want to see defeated are the traitors Belinda Stronach and Scott Brison. I don't know what Brison is doing in Kings-Hants, but Stronach is actually asking the people who worked for her in 2004 - when she was running as a high-profile Conservative - to help her campaign again:

Last May, Belinda Stronach crossed the floor and now she wants her former campaign team to follow.

"If you are still supportive and wish to become involved in the upcoming election campaign, I would love to hear from you!"

Believe me, I'd love for her to hear from me, too. And what I'd say isn't printable on this site.

The website for her Conservative opponent, Lois Brown, is here.

Matthew, Mark, Luke and Joe

The Sun has compiled a list of the worst answers ever from British quiz shows. I don't know if they're all real (the list appears to have been lifted from the internet), but they're still pretty darn funny.

No comment

From NewsMax.com:

Sen. John McCain is leading the charge against so-called "torture" techniques allegedly used by U.S. interrogators, insisting that practices like sleep deprivation and withholding medical attention are not only brutal - they simply don't work to persuade terrorist suspects to give accurate information.

Nearly forty years ago, however - when McCain was held captive in a North Vietnamese prison camp - some of the same techniques were used on him. And - as McCain has publicly admitted at least twice - the torture worked!
[...]
That McCain broke under torture doesn't make him any less of an American hero. But it does prove he's wrong to claim that harsh interrogation techniques simply don't work.

For once, I'm speechless.

Deep Denial

The new book Mao: The Unknown Story (ahem) exposes the Chinese dictator for the murderer, fraud and sadist that he was - and people in Berkeley (where else?) just can't handle it:

Maoist intellectuals have counterattacked, saying the book negates any historical grounds for the Chinese revolution and positive changes in what had been a corrupt society before Mao's military victory in 1949.

Tom Gold, associate dean of international and area studies at UC Berkeley, said he visited China on a guided tour in 1975 and was impressed. "You can't just say it was one evil person," he said in a phone interview. "What Mao did was tap into some sort of psychology. You cannot get away from saying that Mao tapped into something."

Hazbollahstan

Michael Totten has more extraordinary photos at his site, this time from the Lebanon-Israel border region controlled by Hezbollah.

It's absolutely surreal seeing Israeli towns that look like North American suburbs, and territory in which Hezbollah erects billboards showing the bodies of dead IDF soldiers, separated by nothing but a wire fence. (via PJM)

In defence of Wal-Mart

The Washington Post's Sebastian Mallaby defends the world's largest, and arguably most hated, retailer from its legion of critics:

Wal-Mart's critics allege that the retailer is bad for poor Americans. This claim is backward: As Jason Furman of New York University puts it, Wal-Mart is "a progressive success story." Furman advised John "Benedict Arnold" Kerry in the 2004 campaign and has never received any payment from Wal-Mart; he is no corporate apologist. But he points out that Wal-Mart's discounting on food alone boosts the welfare of American shoppers by at least $50 billion a year. The savings are possibly five times that much if you count all of Wal-Mart's products.

These gains are especially important to poor and moderate-income families. The average Wal-Mart customer earns $35,000 a year, compared with $50,000 at Target and $74,000 at Costco. Moreover, Wal-Mart's "every day low prices" make the biggest difference to the poor, since they spend a higher proportion of income on food and other basics. As a force for poverty relief, Wal-Mart's $200 billion-plus assistance to consumers may rival many federal programs. Those programs are better targeted at the needy, but they are dramatically smaller. Food stamps were worth $33 billion in 2005, and the earned-income tax credit was worth $40 billion.
[...]
Wal-Mart's critics also paint the company as a parasite on taxpayers, because 5 percent of its workers are on Medicaid. Actually that's a typical level for large retail firms, and the national average for all firms is 4 percent. Moreover, it's ironic that Wal-Mart's enemies, who are mainly progressives, should even raise this issue. In the 1990s progressives argued loudly for the reform that allowed poor Americans to keep Medicaid benefits even if they had a job. Now that this policy is helping workers at Wal-Mart, progressives shouldn't blame the company. Besides, many progressives favor a national health system. In other words, they attack Wal-Mart for having 5 percent of its workers receive health care courtesy of taxpayers when the policy that they support would increase that share to 100 percent.

Companies like Wal-Mart are not run by saints. They can treat workers and competitors roughly. They may be poor stewards of the environment. When they break the law they must be punished. Wal-Mart is at the center of the globalized, technology-driven economy that's radically increased American inequality, so it's not surprising that it has critics. But globalization and business innovation are nonetheless the engines of progress; and if that sounds too abstract, think of the $200 billion-plus that Wal-Mart consumers gain annually. If critics prevent the firm from opening new branches, they will prevent ordinary families from sharing in those gains. Poor Americans will be chief among the casualties.

Most of the complaints against Wal-Mart - the merchandise is tacky and imported from countries with cheap labor, it contributes to urban sprawl, its low prices drive competitors out of business - can be levelled against almost any large retailer, and deep down are really complaints about capitalism itself. Which is precisely the point. There's much more, including some interesting links, here.

I like Wal-Mart. There, I said it. The selection and prices are good, you can check out merchandise at any department in the store (tip: if the front checkouts are blocked, go to the auto department or cosmetics counter), and you can find some great stuff in the $6.88 DVD bin. Even better, most of its competitors - especially Loblaws and Zellers, the latter the most depressing shopping experience on Earth until very recently - have gotten a lot better since Wal-Mart came to Canada.

What about the effect on smaller, independent retailers? Some have undoubtedly been driven out of business, and that's often a shame. (Having worked for a convenience store once, I can tell you it's not always a shame.) But Wal-Mart took over the old Woolco stores when they moved north in 1994, and most of the places they opened already had a Zellers and/or K-Mart, so it's not like most of the small businesses weren't already battling with big retailers. If you want to campaign against all large stores, so be it, but there's no justification for thrashing Wal-Mart while leaving Target, Zellers, Sears and Canadian Tire unscathed.

Ultimately, it's all about choice. There's no shortage of people who evidently want to work for what is supposedly the most evil employer on earth, and the overwhelming majority of people are choosing to spend their money there. That's the market at work. (As one commenter in that Hit & Run thread puts it, "Wal-Mart seems to be a bit like porn: everyone condemns it but somehow it makes billions.")

Update: a few grammatical corrections made.

Train wreck alert!

Behold the official (anonymous) Liberal campaign blog. Catch it while you can, 'cause it will self-destruct in about 48 hours:

Wow, look at me! I'm in "cyberspace," where no one can hear you scream. Or maybe they CAN hear you scream but they don't pay attention because they're too busy looking at naked ladies. Either way, stop screaming, would you?
[...]
Travelling as part of what is officially called the Leader's Tour (and what is colloquially known among staffers as That Plane That Hardly Ever Seems To Land in Alberta for Some Reason), I will be filing typo-ridden, thumb-pecked dispatches on my Blackberry over the course of the campaign.

Remember: views expressed on this blog do not necessarily represent the policies or beliefs of Paul Martin. Except when I write about the hypnotic musical stylings of Nana Mouskouri. We're totally in sync on that.

I gotta admit, I like that "hardly ever seems to land in Alberta" line. Who's the unnamed Liberal blogger? My money says Scott Feschuk. (via Angry in the Great White North)

Update: yep, it's Feschuk. (and, as you can see, it's not really "anonymous".)

Update II: Feschuk wrote some pretty funny stuff for the National Post, and I have to admit, he's on his game here:

People keep sayng this campaign is a carbon copy of the 2004 election. But that's not true. Stephen Harper has a right handsome new hairstyle. Paul Hellyer has grabbed hold of the campaign agenda, blowing the lid off the whole UFO invasion thing, the number one priority of Canadians who are socially awkward Omni subscribers. And we were all shocked to walk out tonight to discover that, unlike 2004, the PM's oversized face is not on the side of the side of our campaign bus.

Turns out this was an edict from the Prime Minister himself. Big Paul (as we called the massive head, which featured the PM in a boyish haircut and a relentless, toothy smile that we all grew to pathelogically detest) was apparently cramping his style. And frightening small children. We'd pull into small towns in Quebec and we'd invariably hear the frightened screams of innocent toddlers: "Le nez! Le nez!"

If this embarasses the Liberal campaign, so much the better.

Does Harper want to win?

Adam Daifallah has an excellent column in today's Ottawa Citizen, advising Stephen Harper - and Conservatives in general - how to win the election. A key point: the same-sex marriage issue has been decided, people who oppose it are going to vote Conservative anyway, the media is looking for an excuse to jump all over the Conservatives for being "intolerant", and it's time to move on:

For the past couple of years, the party has focused on highlighting Liberal corruption and opposing same-sex marriage. This strategy has created three problems, all of which remain unresolved and continue to plague Mr. Harper.

One, Canadians know little about what he actually stands for: they only know what he is against. Two, the Liberals and the media defined the Tory leader before he could do so himself, which explains his personal unpopularity and the Tories' inability to break 30 per cent in polls. And three, the party has not been able to attract new support because it has failed to reach out to new constituencies. Most people who oppose same-sex marriage are already voting Tory. The party has to move beyond that base.
[...]
Everyone already knows the Tories will cut taxes. Now they need some innovative and counterintuitive policies in areas such as social policy, the environment, immigration and Quebec that will bring in new voters.

Instead of harping on same-sex marriage, why not promote the virtues of marriage and family, no matter whether they be straight or gay? Everyone can agree that strong families are the foundation of our society. Mr. Harper should talk about the need to encourage more marriage, less divorce and more child-rearing. Let Paul Martin try to characterize that as extreme!

No prizes for guessing the first big policy announcement of Stephen Harper's campaign:

Conservative Leader Stephen Harper launched his campaign Tuesday by steering it straight into the electoral turbulence of gay marriage.

Either way, Harper promised to preserve more than 3,000 gay marriages already performed across Canada.

So, we need a new vote on the issue, in which gays' and lesbians' right to marry will hopefully be taken away - for about five minutes, until the Supreme Court of Canada declares the "traditional" definition of marriage unconstitutional - but the same-sex couples who have already married can stay married, regardless. Got it.

For crying out loud, Steve, whose brilliant idea was this?

Hubbard's tomb

A New Mexico TV station found the location of the Church (snicker) of Scientology's desert compound, archive and UFO base:

The church tried to persuade station KRQE not to air its report last week about the aerial signposts marking a Scientology compound that includes a huge vault "built into a mountainside," the station said on its Web site. The tunnel was constructed to protect the works of L. Ron Hubbard, the late science-fiction writer who founded the church in the 1950s.

The church offered a tour of the underground facility if KRQE would kill the piece, the station said in its newscast. Scientology also called KRQE's owner, Emmis Communications, and "sought the help of a powerful New Mexican lawmaker" to lobby against airing the piece, the station reported on its Web site.
[...]
The church maintains two other vaults in California to preserve Hubbard's materials and words, according to Hines and another longtime staff member who also quit a couple of years ago, Chuck Beatty of Pittsburgh.

"The whole purpose of putting these teachings in the underground vaults was expressly so that in the event that everything gets wiped out somehow, someone would be willing to locate them and they would still be there," said Beatty, who spent 28 years in Scientology. Some loyalists are tasked specifically with the "super-duper confidential" job of coming back to Earth in the far-off future, he added.

If the Church - sorry, I can't stop laughing when I write that - had a sense of humor about itself, they would have built this in Roswell. (Say what you like about the Raelians, but that's what they'd do if they had the resources.)

Still, it's a pretty neat idea when you think about it. If Chimpy McLikudburton and the neocon Zionist cabal start a nuclear war that destroys the earth (as reliable sources on the internet assure me is going to happen any minute now, uh-huh), and we all go back to the caves and start over from scratch, we'll probably find this stuff someday and assume 21st-century Western civilization was dominated by the Church of Scientology. Of course, with all the media attention Tom Cruise got this past summer, maybe it is.

Game on

As predicted, the election has been called for January 23 - and the campaign "is expected to include a week-long break at Christmas," according to the Canadian Press.

I expect that "break" to last for about, oh, five minutes, with each party leader saying, "well, I wanted to give you a respite from electioneering over the holiday season, but [Martin/Harper/Duceppe] tried to take advantage of it." (No one will mind if Jack Layton campaigns over Christmas. Well, maybe the Liberals, if it's a close race.)

Weblogs are weapons

Despite the mullahs' attempts to censor the internet, Iranian anti-government weblogs are popping up all over the place:

Iran is fighting a constant battle against dissenters who are using the internet to voice criticism of the Islamic Republic and to push for freedom and democracy.

There are an estimated 100,000 active blogs written by Iranians both within the country and across the diaspora. Persian ties with French as the second most common blogging language after English.
[...]
The authorities have reportedly spent millions on programmes designed to filter cyberspace and block access to controversial sites, with names such as "regime change Iran", "free thoughts on Iran" and "women against fundamentalism".

"There are ways around it but it is getting harder and it is very annoying," he said. "It is possible to trick the authorities into believing that we are not in Teheran but somewhere else". [emphasis added]

When the Iranian theocracy falls, don't say you never saw it coming.

Wrong guy fired

Steve Mariucci, who racked up a 15-28 record as coach of the Detroit Lions, has been fired.

Matt Millen, who racked up a 20-55 record as president and GM of the Detroit Lions, has not.

Campaign preview

Paul Martin, addressing the Liberal caucus, just referred to the Tories as the "neoconservatives".

Like "fascist", the left has abused that word so much, it no longer has any meaning.

It's votin' time!

171 MPs just stood in support of the non-confidence motion - more than enough to bring down the government. [Update: CP story here.]

The Conservatives are behind in most of the polls, but this election is ours to win. My advice:

1. Don't let the Liberals set the agenda. They have betrayed the public trust, and the onus is on the Martin government to show why it deserves to stay in power - not on Stephen Harper to prove he isn't "scary".

2. Don't be afraid to run as Conservatives, not a "Lite" version of the Liberal Party of Canada. Canadians are much more open to new ideas in areas such as health care and immigration than the CBC or Toronto Star would have you believe.

3. Lock Ralph Klein in the basement until after election day. No, it isn't fair that Alberta gets all the blame for "destroying" medicare when Quebec is further along in introducing private health care. And it isn't fair that the Conservatives are dismissed as a "Western" party, when the Liberal caucus is overwhelmingly from Ontario. But that's the line the Liberals want to push, and many Canadian media outlets (I'm thinking of a newspaper whose name rhymes with "Robe and Bail") will enthusiastically push it for them. The last thing Harper needs is Ralph Klein to open his mouth about medicare.

4. If the Liberals bring up Iraq, throw Paul Martin's statements in support of the war back in their faces - and emphasize that Iraqis are lining up for hours to exercise their right to vote, while the Liberals are trying to make you believe it's somehow too hard for Canadians to exercise that right in the winter.

5. If the Liberals accuse the Tories of plotting to "destroy" medicare, ask Paul Martin where his personal physician works.

6. And most of all: it's not enough to tell Canadians they shouldn't vote Liberal. Canadians want an alternative. Let's give them one.

Let's get it on!

January 23, 2006

That's the date of the next federal election, according to Reuters.

The non-confidence vote is scheduled for 6:45PM Eastern.

Rubert loses a fan

I haven't paid any attention to hatemongering freak Robert McClelland in months, which probably explains my sunny disposition lately. But I can't resist directing you to this entry from Warren Kinsella's blog, and then the comments thread that started it all. The really strange thing is that ol' Rubert actually has a point about whether an evidently isolated use of the N-word in 1975 should disqualify Liberal MP Andrew Telegdi from public service (sadly, his version of "eeny meeny miney moe" is indeed the way we said it in the late '70s) but, as usual, he digs and digs until he comes off like the blithering maniac we all know and love.

Best Rubert quote ever: "Hey fucknuts. Have you spent 15 years of your life fighting racism? No. Well I have. So fuck off with your libelous bullshit." (Rubert "fights racism" in his sleep, where he's also a Viking!)

Who didn't see this coming?

Hey, check out who just joined Saddam Hussein's defence team:

The trial of Saddam Hussein and seven co-defendants resumes in a fortified Baghdad courtroom on Monday with former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark joining the team defending Iraq's overthrown president.

"It is absolutely essential that the court is legal in its constitution. A court cannot be a court unless it is absolutely independent of all external pressures and forces."

The Toxic Tex...er, Liberals

The federal government had a big ad in my local paper this weekend, trumpeting the fact that Canada - which actually ratified the Kyoto accord, a big part of the reason people like us better than those selfish Americans - is hosting a big climate-change summit later this year. Well, it's one thing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol - and it's another thing to actually, you know, live up to it:

In preparation for this week's international climate summit in Montreal, the UN's climate change secretariat has released a report on the progress, or lack thereof, made by the 40 developed countries covered by the Kyoto Protocol.

Federal Environment Minister Stéphane Dion attributes Canada's rise partly to robust economic growth. The economy has grown by 43 per cent since 1990. Canada is also being saddled with emissions from the booming energy industry, which is exporting record amounts of oil and gas to the United States.
[...]
One surprise in the figures is that Canada's emission record is far worse than even the United States, where the Bush administration has refused to ratify Kyoto.

Mr. Bramley said the United States is "actually ahead of Canada in just about every area" of environmental policies used to curb emissions. And he said the record of individual states "is far ahead of any province in Canada."

When Newspapers Lie

The Stockholm Spectator catches the Swedish paper Aftonbladet blatantly making up stories about American servicemen and underaged prostitutes in Africa . (Update here.)

At least the Aftonbladet reporter used his real name. The Danish group blog Viking Observer looked into a Christian Science Monitor report on the "Mohammed cartoons" controversy in Copenhagen - the title, "Danish editor tests right to violate Muslim taboos", kind of says it all - and not only found reporter James Brandon lying about details of the story, but also that "Brandon" is really Andrew Nassim, a British reporter of Arab descent, with an, um, interesting background. (via Shire Network News)

The people in her neighbourhood

I was looking for Cathy Seipp's weblog (cathyseipp.journalspace.com) this afternoon, and I was a little surprised to see what came up when I mistakenly typed in "cathyseipp.com".

Either Seipp's political views have changed markedly in the last little while, or someone in the Phil Angelides campaign registered the domain name behind her back. I've e-mailed her to find out.

Update: Seipp tells me the domain name is owned by some lunatic ex-teacher who once ran a site slandering her, and that he's now likely redirecting people to "Schwarzenegger Street".

There's a lesson here for anyone who maintains a presence on the web. Anyone know the cheapest place to register "damianpenny.ca"?

Echoes of '85

The Bears needed some luck - specifically, a missed field-goal attempt by the Bucs - to beat Tampa today, but they've now won seven in a row for the first time since 1986.

The Chicago defence actually allowed a touchdown today, but holding the Bucs to ten points isn't bad at all. I don't think this version of the Bears has the offence to go all the way (Orton is going to get better, but he made more than a few "what the hell was that?" throws this afternoon), but that defence has allowed just under 11 points per game. Can they bring it below ten? Of their five games left, holding the Packers (twice) and the Vikings off the board shouldn't be too hard, and the Steelers are certainly beatable if Roethlisberger isn't 100%, but the big test will come against the Falcons on Dec. 18.

Either way, at the start of the year, if you had told me the Bears would finish at least .500, I would have suggested you resume taking your meds.

The best way to critique a movie is to make another movie

Instead of moping about "liberal Hollywood", as most conservatives are wont to do, Bruce Willis is putting his money where his mouth is:

Angered by negative portrayals of the conflict in Iraq, Bruce Willis, the Hollywood star, is to make a pro-war film in which American soldiers will be depicted as brave fighters for freedom and democracy.

The 50-year-old actor said that he was in talks about a film of “these guys who do what they are asked to for very little money to defend and fight for what they consider to be freedom”.
[...]
He is expected to base the film on the writings of the independent blogger Michael Yon, a former special forces green beret who was embedded with Deuce Four and sent regular dispatches about their heroics.

Yon was at the soldiers’ ball with Willis, who got to know him through his internet war reports on www.michaelyon.blogspot.com. “What he is doing is something the American media and maybe the world media isn’t doing,” the actor said, “and that’s telling the truth about what’s happening in the war in Iraq.” [emphasis added]

How to fix PJM

Laurence Simon has started up a discussion board for readers and members. Charles Johnson, Roger Simon, and the others behind Pajamas Media should be reading it regularly, especially this thread.

Now that PJM is putting up some original content, such as this posting about Teen People's abortive puff piece on neo-Nazi singers Prussian Blue, the site is showing some promise. I like the new logo, too. But why does it feature only one story, and one "best of the blogs" feature, at a time? And why is the URL still "osm.org", while pajamasmedia.com still takes you to the old "transition" page?

The truth will set China free

Communist officials are desperately trying to cover up news about a devastating chemical spill that has left millions of Chinese without drinking water, but the story just will not stay buried:

Twelve days after an estimated 100 tons of benzene and other toxic compounds poured in the Songhua River following an explosion at a state-owned petrochemical plant, the party is struggling to contain a political crisis as much as an environmental one.

Meanwhile, the central government used the news service to announce it was sending a team of high-level investigators to Harbin. In a sign the party is worried about a public backlash, the report suggested in unusually blunt terms that officials would be disciplined. "Punishments of irresponsible acts are on the way," it said.
[...]
Reached by phone, an environmental official in Songyuan, a city of more than 400,000 located between Jilin and Harbin, confirmed that officials there were told of the spill but chose to keep it secret. The official, who asked to be identified only by a surname, Li, said the city shut off the part of its water system that is linked to the river but told the public it was just doing repairs.

It was not until Nov. 21, when they were confronted with tests showing pollution at more than 100 times acceptable levels, that Harbin officials decided to shut down the water supply. Even then, the city said the reason for doing so was to "carry out repair and inspections on the pipe network."

I can't help thinking of another incident, 19 years ago, when another Communist government tried to cover up news about an ecological catastrophe. And we all know what happened just a few years later.

Dream ends

Another chapter in the long, heartbreaking decline of a legendary automaker: Buick is dumping the Aerosmith "Dream On" ad campaign in favor of ads emphasizing "precision engineering".

General Motors' Buick division is ditching Aerosmith and its "Dream On" anthem in favor of precision-tuning and heated windshield wiper fluid in a new campaign from Interpublic Group's McCann Erickson.

Ads from the Detroit office of McCann will break on Monday with the new tagline, "Beyond Precision." The spots are meant to showcase the quality and luxury features of the new Lucerne sedan.
[...]
The campaign replaces a previous effort from the agency tagged "Dream up." Those spots featured women daydreaming while in bathtubs and showers that they were in Buick vehicles. As part of its soundtrack, the campaign used the rock anthem, "Dream On."

GM spends more than $100 million annually advertising the brand, per Nielsen Monitor-Plus.

Heated washer fluid actually sounds like a pretty neat idea, but I'd rather have a Buick with a rear-wheel-drive, the way God intended. Unfortunately, there are laws against false advertising, so Buick can't use that in their ads.

The Led Zeppelin "Rock and Roll" campaign has worked for Cadillac because the company put out genuinely exciting new products to go with it. (Even BBC's Top Gear, notoriously rough on American cars, praised the CTS-V for its handling and V8 engine, though they said it has a way to go in terms of quality.) By contrast, the new Buicks are a rebadged Uplander, a rebadged TrailBlazer, and the Lacrosse/Allure and Lucerne - perfectly nice, well-made cars with absolutely no appeal to anyone except 65-year-old retirees who've driven nothing but Buicks since 1975, dagnabbit. (I rented a Buick Century a few weeks ago, and it felt just like driving my father's '78 Dodge Diplomat.)

I don't think Buick can be saved, but I'd at least like to see it take a Hail-Mary shot at recovering its old glory - maybe with a new version of this.

"Alright, alright, the Holocaust happened. Are you happy now?"

After years of denying their existence, "historian" David Irving now admits that, yes, the Nazis really did have gas chambers. (via Kathy Shaidle)

So why did he spend so many years saying they couldn't possibly have existed? Because the ultimate goal of Holocaust denial is to make Nazism respectable again, and telling the truth would have made it look considerably less attractive to potential converts. (Some legitimate historians once praised Irving for digging up rare archival material, but Richard Evans's devastating book Lying About Hitler exposes Irving as a liar and fraud.)

Two Fascists

David Duke in Syria:

I have come from the peace-loving American people to your peace-loving Syrian president. It hurts my heart to tell you that part of my country is occupied by Zionists, just as part of your country, the Golan Heights, is occupied by Zionists. ...It is not just the West Bank of Palestine, it is not just the Golan Heights that are occupied by the Zionists, but Washington DC, and New York, and London, and many other capitals in the world. Your fight for freedom is the same as our fight for freedom.

George Galloway in Syria:

I want to be very clear. I was clear in July, and what I said in July has followed me all over the world by the American and Israeli propaganda machine, so I want to be very clear again. All dignified people in the world, whether Arabs or Muslims or others with dignity, are very proud of the speech made by President Bashar Al-Assad a few days ago here in Damascus. ...For me he is the last Arab ruler, and Syria is the last Arab country. It is the fortress of the remaining dignity of the Arabs, and that's why I'm proud to be here and addressing you this evening. ...After July he (Blair) condemned me for what I said about President Bashar, but only two years before, he was taking the president to meet Her Majesty the queen. If President Bashar is so dangerous a man, why did he take him inside the royal palace in London? The truth is, Mr. Blair changed his policy towards Syria because President Bush ordered him to. Mr. Blair too is a slave of the slaves.

(via Harry's Place)

Quote of the Day

"I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered."

- George Best, 1946-2005.

See this post at Harry's Place, too.

I almost forgot!

Today is Buy Nothing Day, when the Adbusters robots take some time off from warning about Jewish conspiracies to protest "rampant consumerism".

Meanwhile, I finally made a couple of long-overdue Amazon purchases - James Lileks's Mommy Knows Worst and the big Car and Driver 50th Anniversary book - today. Just a coincidence, of course...

Now they notice us

That Paul Hellyer story has been on the Drudge Report all day, and the old guy was just interviewed on Fox News Channel's The Big Story. (He admitted he hasn't actually seen the alien wreckage himself, but reputable people tell him some of it is being stored in the White House basement.)

When Canadians say they wish the American media would pay more attention to them, is this what they had in mind?

Selling Narnia

Disney's heavily hyped film version of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe comes out on December 9. Rick McGinnis has an interesting report from the press junket in NYC, where everyone was afraid to utter the "C" word, even though C.S. Lewis's book is widely known to be an allegory for Christianity. (Warning: if, like me, you haven't read the book, the post gives away the ending.)

I hope the film turns out to be good, but the marketing campaign - one of the most overblown I've ever seen - is already turning me off, and the movie doesn't even come out for another two weeks. When Star Wars became a cultural phenomenon in 1977, no one had expected the film to be a hit, and it took months for all the merchandise to come out. (That Christmas, parents gave their children gift certificates good for one Star Wars toy early in 1978, when they became available.) By contrast, in 1990, a flood of Dick Tracy swag hit the shelves months before the film was released, and much of it is probably still sitting there. The movie did fairly well, but nothing near what Disney was expecting - and the excessive hype may have even turned people off from seeing it.

So I wonder if the studio has learned its lesson this time around. The Chronicles of Narnia might be a more familiar and beloved property than Dick Tracy. But it's no Lord of the Rings (a phenomenon Disney is obviously trying to copy with Narnia, even making The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe in New Zealand), and unless the movie is absolutely spectacular, a lot of companies are going to lose a lot of money on Narnia merchandise.

Just because Hollywood knows how to market a film doesn't mean they can turn anything into a cultural phenomenon. You may be able to get a lot of people to check out the movie, but that doesn't mean they'll buy the books and video games on the way home. I wish Narnia the best of luck, and after I read the book I'll check out the film, but I'm not sure anything can live up to this much hype.

Can this company be saved?

Robert Farago at The Truth About Cars has been running an excellent series of "GM Death Watch" editorials (also available in podcast form) about the impending demise of General Motors. Why can't GM, with all its resources, produce its own Camry or Civic? Because the company's stifling bureaucratic culture celebrates mediocrity above all else:

In all the discussion about GM’s perilous financials, it’s often forgotten that the company itself is a disaster. Think of it this way: no one at GM wakes up in the morning and says, right, let’s go make some vehicles that are two product cycles behind the competition at a price that will bankrupt The General within the next year. [(Corvette engineer Dave Hill) would have probably sacrificed his left testicle to equip the ‘Vette with Audi-esque soft touch plastics.] But something happens between morning muesli and Miller time that kills GM workers’ creativity and stifles the company’s competitiveness. That something is bureaucracy.

It’s General Motors by name, general motors by nature. Once you go down that road, it’s no wonder that the Chinese walls separating the brands disappear, and dozens of models across the eight brands emerge on their respective forecourts courtesy of the bloodless process known as badge engineering. Since all the cars within each of GM’s eight brands must do everything pretty well, but none are asked to excel in any one area (save Hummer, but give it time), it makes perfect sense to save money by sharing management, designers, workers, models, parts, marketing, etc. Is it any wonder that GM's company culture rewards measured uniformity rather than breakthrough creativity?

I'm not quite as pessimistic about GM's future, mainly because so many carmakers on the verge of bankruptcy have managed to pull it together at the last minute - Ford with the Taurus, Chrysler with the K-Car, Nissan under Carlos Ghosn. But I can't remember a time when people weren't talking about GM's fundamental problems.

Some of its products, like the new Solstice (delayed for months because of production problems, thereby missing the part of the year when you really, really want to sell a two-seat roadster) are very nice, but the company really needs a mass-market masterpiece like the original Taurus, which can go head-to-head with the Accord, Camry and Altima. The new Malibu should have been great, but when I rented one earlier this year I was dismayed to find the usual GM cost-cutting all over the place. Ditto for the G6 and Cobalt, which are almost there but fall just short of their top competitors.

Sadly, a bloated behemoth like GM may have to go bankrupt, shedding thousands of workers and maybe half its brands, to regain the focus it needs to compete with Toyota and Honda. (I stand by my proposal that the company should be split up.)

Hellyer in Space

I blogged about former Defence Minister Paul Hellyer's enthusiasm for UFO conspiracies a few months ago, but only when I saw this press release did I realize just how long he's been off his meds:

A former Canadian Minister of Defence and Deputy Prime Minister under Pierre Trudeau has joined forces with three Non-governmental organizations to ask the Parliament of Canada to hold public hearings on Exopolitics -- relations with “ETs.”

Hellyer warned, "The United States military are preparing weapons which could be used against the aliens, and they could get us into an intergalactic war without us ever having any warning. He stated, "The Bush administration has finally agreed to let the military build a forward base on the moon, which will put them in a better position to keep track of the goings and comings of the visitors from space, and to shoot at them, if they so decide."

But if aliens are really out there, and we don't know whether they're hostile or not, isn't that a reason we should build weapons in space? Only a warmongering neocon would ask a question like that, I guess.

Update: a commenter writes, "I'm just glad that he's a former Liberal cabinet minister. If he was a former Tory, the MSM would have unearthed twenty year old pictures of Hellyer shaking hands with Harper and would be peppering Harper with questions about his support for Hellyer's 'UFO' policies."

Maybe I shouldn't give the CBC any ideas, but Hellyer is a former Tory, sort of. He left the Trudeau Liberals to form his abortive "Action Canada" party in the early 1970s, and then ran for the leadership of the federal Conservatives in 1976 - as the right-wing candidate, no less.

Hellyer later founded the anti-globalization "Canadian Action Party", which prints campaign materials in comic-book form and features a link to "What Really Happened" on its website.

Deliver us from 50 Cent

Another racist, old-fashioned Conservative MP is demanding that Canada prevent rapper 50 Cent from entering the country next week. Oh, wait...

A Toronto-area member of Parliament is calling on his own government to block the American rap singer 50 Cent from entering Canada.

50 Cent, who was born Curtis Jackson in Queen's, N.Y., has a criminal record and would need a ministerial permit to enter Canada.

That'll teach these filthy Americans to give away toys

The brave Iraqi resistance strikes again:

A suicide attacker steered a car packed with explosives toward U.S. soldiers giving away toys to children outside a hospital in central Iraq on Thursday, killing at least 31 people. Almost all of the victims were women and children, police said.

Kurt Vonnegut must be so proud.

Book Review: Rogue State: How a Nuclear North Korea Threatens America by William L. Triplett II

[originally posted to Blogcritics.org]

From an English-language dispatch from North Korea's KCNA news agency, dated 16 November 2005 (sorry, "Juche 94"):

American-style "democracy" is the most reactionary and anti-popular ruling system that mercilessly tramples down the people's desire and demand for freedom and democracy and a tool of aggression and interference. …under American-style "democracy" misanthropy and the jungle law are predominant, extreme racial discrimination, maltreatment of women and children, crimes of terrible violence, slavish flesh traffic and corrupted gangster culture are prevailing and the people live always under the threat of lives.

That's not a line from Team America: World Police, but the kind of rhetoric the "People's Democratic Republic" of Korea wants the world to see. So the very first line in William Triplett's Rogue State, allegedly a North Korean diplomat's response to American allegations that it was building nuclear weapons, certainly sounds plausible. The diplomat reportedly huffed, "not only YES, but HELL YES, and you tell that to your president!"

Few people doubt that North Korea has an active nuclear weapons program, and the horrific human-rights abuses of Kim Jong-Il's regime are well documented. But William Triplett's Rogue State, one of many recently-published books about the hermit kingdom, goes even further, detailing North Korea's role in weapons proliferation, support for international terrorism, and even drug trafficking. Most provocatively, Triplett accuses Communist China, the closest thing North Korea has to an ally, of quietly backing Kim's most dangerous adventures.

Right from the start, explains Triplett, North Korea - until 1994, under the strict control of Kim's father, Kim Il-Sung - has been a catastrophe for human rights and democracy. Thousands were slaughtered and dumped into mass graves by Mao-backed North Korean troops following the invasion of South Korea in 1950. North Korean agents murdered its Southern neighbor's popular First Lady in 1974, killed 17 South Korean cabinet ministers in a 1983 bombing, and blew up a Korean Air jetliner in 1987 - killing 115 people - for no reason except to protest the Seoul Olympics. (One wonders what the victims' relatives must think, when they see North and South Korea fielding "united" Olympic teams.) They have kidnaped Japanese civilians to train their spies, sold missile technology and weapons to anyone who wants it, and, according to Triplett, are working on missiles capable of reaching American soil.

But Triplett also makes allegations which have received considerably less attention in the international media. He cites intelligence estimates that the North Korean government has poured many of its scarce resources into opium production (in a country not really suited to same), and notes that its diplomats have repeatedly been caught smuggling narcotics into Europe. He describes the country’s security and espionage apparatus in ways that terms that seem to come straight from the movies - tunnels under Pyongyang, installations buried in mountains, and an elaborate mock-up of a typical Seoul neighborhood, all the better to brainwash young agents into carrying out suicide missions for the Dear Leader. (It’s one thing to blow yourself up thinking there are 72 virgins waiting for you on the other side, but something else to give your life when your ideology precludes belief in a deity greater than Kim Jong-Il.)

And behind it all, writes Triplett, is China, perfectly happy to give Kim all the weaponry, aid and political support he needs. The author uses an old Chinese warrior analogy, “killing with a borrowed knife”, to describe the way China uses its neighbor to make trouble for the Americans while publicly playing nice.

The problem with Rogue State is that many of its most serious allegations - for example, that North Korean planes were allowed to refuel in China while shipping nuclear components to Pakistan - are largely unsubstantiated or based on defectors’ evidence. In a totalitarian nightmare world like North Korea, unfortunately, it’s almost impossible for reliable information to get out, and the testimony of defectors and escapees must fill the void. All of their stories may be true - but they could also be embellished, contaminated by rumors, or designed to tell the Americans and South Koreans what they want to hear. I don’t want to come across like Noam Chomsky in the 1970s, arrogantly dismissing horror stories told by Cambodians who fled the Khmer Rouge, but such testimony should always be approached with some degree of skepticism.

Triplett, unfortunately, tends to toss every allegation, substantiated or not, into the same pot, leaving the reader to sort it all out. Rogue State would have been a much better book had Triplett acknowledged the problems with or gaps in much of his evidence.

No book on North Korea would be complete without a discussion of Kim’s personality cult and the horrific, complete repression of independent thought and individual rights in North Korea. Rogue State includes a chapter on this subject, but anyone who wants to know what it’s like to live there would be better off reading Kang Chol-Hwan's The Aquariums of Pyongyang. If you want to know how North Korea poses a threat to the United States and the rest of the world, Rogue State contains many disturbing allegations, but the reader should exercise considerable caution in unquestionably accepting all of them. Still, considering what we do know about North Korea - and how the North Korean government presents itself to the rest of the world - I won’t be one bit surprised if, when the Kim dynasty is finally brought low, everything in Rogue State turns out to have been accurate.

ONLY IN THE GREAT WHITE NORTH?

Things that are unique to Canada, from an obviously Ontario perspective, and some may be wrong. Others?

Canadian Tire
Saying "When I was in Grade 5"
Two-fours of beer
Harvey's
An Air Force with a kilt
Poutine
Acura 1.8s
Hot roast beef sandwiches with gravy
Cigarettes in packs of 25
Dépanneurs
Robertson Davies
Jane Taber
Stompin' Tom
Stoned Wheat Thins (whoopee!)
Nabob coffee (tea comes from India, not coffee)
Government-owned liquor stores
Curling as a major television draw.

Over and out. It's been fun. Thank you Damian.

American Turkey Day

I still don't understand why you Yanks wait until so late in the year to celebrate Thanksgiving, but have a great one anyway. In the spirit of the occasion, I made sure to have turkey today myself. (Okay, it was a turkey sandwich at Tim Hortons, but still...)

Thanks to everyone who kept the site going in my absence - especially Mark Collins, who went on a blogging rampage. Regular blogging will resume after the Cowboys game.

ONE AWAITS MUSLIM CONTRITION FOR THE CONQUEST OF THE NEAR EAST, PERSIA, NORTH AFRICA, SINDH, SPAIN, SICILY, ASIA MINOR (ANATOLIA), NORTHERN INDIA AND THE BALKANS

Meanwhile the Archbishop of Canterbury thinks the Crusades were a Bad Thing.

The Crusades were a serious betrayal of Christian beliefs, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, said yesterday.

The crusades began in 1095 when Pope Urban II called on western Christendom to take up the sword to "liberate the holy land" after Muslims effectively cut off Jerusalem from Christian pilgrims.

As an atheist traditionalist (this is Mark, not Damian) I am indeed angered.

I would just remind readers that the great spread of Islam by the sword started with the Arab Muslims' conquest of Jerusalem (then part of the Christian Eastern Roman Empire) in 636 and did not end until the defeat of the Muslim Ottoman Turks at the seige of Vienna in 1683.

Lest we forget.

Crusader states in the Levant from 1099-1291 are small beer by comparison and scarcely deserve the Archbishop's contrition.

By the way, one supposes the estate of Dwight D. Eisenhower should act to change the title of his book describing the liberation of western Europe, by allied forces under his command, from the Nazis. General Eisenhower called his book "Crusade in Europe".

RUSSIAN "DEMOCRACY" IS CURDLING

President Putin is stuffing it to "civil society", especially non-governmental organizations with foreign links.

Russia moved Wednesday to impose greater government control over charities and other private organizations, including some of the world's most prominent, in a move aimed at restricting foreign support for political activity in the country.

"This is the last sector of civil society that has not fallen under government control," Aleksandr B. Petrov, the deputy director in Moscow for the international group Human Rights Watch, said at a news conference held Tuesday in hopes of persuading the Parliament to reject or at least amend the legislation...

How the dreams are fading. A great book: "Black Earth: A Journey through Russia after the Fall", Andrew Meier, 2003.

ARE THE CANADIAN PEOPLE READY FOR THE BODY BAGS?

Once again our troops will be engaging the bad guys.

Some 1,300 Edmonton-based troops will lead a multinational force into the Taliban's backyard of southern Afghanistan early next year.

[Brig.-Gen. David] Fraser will lead the nine-to-12 month multinational mission, which will also include troops from the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Estonia, Denmark, Australia and Romania...

The Canadian government has been warning the people, but I suspect they have not been listening closely.

Defence Minister Bill Graham and Defence Staff Chief Gen. Rick Hillier have in recent months repeatedly warned Canadians about the mortal dangers that will come with Canada's very different military role once it takes over the lead in fighting terrorism in southern Afghanistan from the Americans. While their words have helped create greater public awareness of what is at stake, Col. Noonan's personal opinion is some Canadians still have not heard the message.

The Dutch are contributing more than 1,000 troops, many of them to fly and maintain Chinook transport helicopters and Apache gunships.

It amazes me that the Canadian Forces talked the Liberals into accepting this renewed combat role--which I fully support. I cannot help but suspect there must have been some very heavy arm-twisting indeed behind the scenes by the US.

Graham, Hillier and other generals have made a major and honest effort to warn the people of the risks of casualties in this combat mission but I doubt very much has sunk in. I wonder what the reaction will be if 20, or 50, or 100 body bags come back to Canada.

Update: On-air news lead at 1600 on CFRA, Ottawa--"Canadian tragedy in Afghanistan".

Story: One private has been killed in a vehicle accident in Kandahar, no hostile action.

Update II: A message from our Prime Minister--"Today is a sombre day and I was deeply saddened to learn of this terrible loss, which is not only a loss to The Royal Canadian Regiment in Gagetown, New Brunswick, the Army, and the Canadian Forces, but also to all Canadians."

Their vehicle rolled over.

An apparent accident. Members of the Canadian Forces die in accidents all the time. Military duty imposes certain extra risks. So does police, fire and EMS duty. And working in hospitals. And many other people die in accidents. Why in this case does the prime minister issue a statement?

I believe the title of this post is ever more to the point.

MEXICO ON JAMES BAY

When the Globe's John Ibbitson is good, he can be very, very good.

The optimists hope for reforms that will reverse generations of stagnation and decline; the pessimists fear deadlock or empty promises that perpetuate the status quo. How are you going to know who is right?..

If we can answer that question honestly, we'll know whether this aboriginal summit was a failure or a success

(Text a mix from the column, Third World rules will gauge success of native summit, full text not online, and from "Norman's Spectator: The Column I'm Glad I Didn't Write" [!])

Week 12

The Americans persist in holding Thanksgiving in November for some reason, so the games start early this week. Hopefully I'll get back home early enough to catch the big Broncos-Cowboys showdown tomorrow afternoon.

Last week I was a sizzling 11-5, bringing my season total to 86-75.

Atlanta at Detroit - upset special. I know, I know, but the Kittens play pretty well at home.
Denver at Dallas
Baltimore at Cincinnati
Carolina at Buffalo - upset special #2. I'd say the Panthers are still shell-shocked from last weekend's Chicago disaster, and playing in cold Buffalo won't help.
Chicago at Tampa Bay - I just gotta.
Cleveland at Minnesota
New England at Kansas City
San Diego at Washington - the Skins are done. (Now that I've said that, watch them score 40 this weekend.)
San Francisco at Tennessee - zzzzzzzzzzzzz.
St. Louis at Houston - if Arizona can beat the Rams in St. Louis, Houston can beat the Rams in Houston.
Jacksonville at Arizona
Miami at Oakland
Green Bay at Philadelphia - at the start of the season, who would have imagined this game would be so pointless?
NY Giants at Seattle - my MVP selection this year: Shawn Alexander.
New Orleans at NY Jets - when was the last time a team was forced to use five QBs in a single season?
Pittsburgh at Indianapolis - even if Roethlisberger plays, I'm still taking the Colts.

WHY THERE ARE TRAFFIC JAMS IN BAGHDAD

Do the people of Iraq know something US Senators do not?

...a survey last month from the U.S.-based International Republican Institute, 47% of Iraqis polled said their country was headed in the right direction, as opposed to 37% who said they thought that it was going in the wrong direction. And 56% thought things would be better in six months. Only 16% thought they would be worse.

This is not meant to suggest that everything is wonderful in Iraq. The situation remains grim in many respects. But the most disheartening indicator of all is simply the American public's loss of confidence in the war effort. Abu Musab Zarqawi may be losing on the Arab street (his own family has disowned him), but he's winning on Main Street...

I still remain sceptical that three groups with little, if any, common affection can live together in a peaceful democracy (cf. Bosnia, Kosovo).

BANG! BANG! YOU ARE DEAD

So why isn't it whitey shooting black people dead in Toronto? (Full text not online.)

Sending young black men to prison isn’t going to stop the gun violence in Toronto because racism is a major cause of the escalating bloodshed, the Coalition of African Canadian Organizations said yesterday.

“We are a community of people who have faced systemic racism, anti-black racism,” said Sandra Carnegie-Douglas, president of the Jamaican Canadian Association. “It’s an underlying cause. It’s an underlying problem.”

And don't fret about what the kids are listening to.

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty says he doesn't think gangsta rappers like 50 Cent can be blamed for the deadly gunplay on the streets of Toronto this year.

McGuinty says he "wouldn't want to put too much stock" in 50 Cent's influence and that of other rappers even if they do hold some sway with young people.

One wonders if Mr McGuinty is familiar with Mr Cent's website.

Perhaps Mr Cent should be invited in his expert capacity to the gun violence summit the Prime Minister says he will attend after the federal election.

Maybe a billion or so dollars over ten years or so can be found to attack the root causes of murder.

That would certainly please the Toronto Star's editorial writers (surprise, surprise).

A large forum pulling everyone together could speed progress on vital reforms such as education programs, advocacy funding and employment initiatives counteracting the dead weight of racism still burdening the black community...

Other long-term action includes enhanced recreation programs, job training, mentoring and other initiatives rooted in the community...

And while we're rooting about in the causes, let's be careful not to jail too many perps.

Update: An interesting post, Gun Violence: Government castrates young men, on the roles of welfare, single-mother families and the lack of decent role models in all this: from "Angry in the Great White North".

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION; NEGATIVE REACTION

Caucasian Chechens may qualify.

How lovely that it only took three days worth of public backlash for the federal Public Works Department to rescind an utterly racist and completely discriminatory hiring policy that would have seen the department only hire, well, anyone but able-bodied white men for the next several months...

It appears that nothing has changed with Correctional Service Canada, either, as they're seeking parole officers in B.C. that self-identify as an "aboriginal person, visible minority or a person with a disability."

MARTIN DOESN'T HATE THE DAMN AMERICANS; HE'S JUST PLAYING POLITICS

And assisting Canadians with their delusions of grandeur and inherent goodness.

The biggest barrier to improved relations with the United States is the "uncertain, erratic policy stewardship" of Prime Minister Paul Martin and his ministers, says a former Canadian ambassador to the United States.

This is more than just dishonest, he writes. "It also has negative consequences, because it encourages the view among Canadians that they are doing much more in the world than they actually are."..

Meanwhile, war-mongering Australia, Germany, Japan, The Netherlands and Spain have nothing against the "weaponization of space".

And it took half a year to get our Grizzly armoured vehicles to African Union peacekeepers in Sudan (see November 18: "The Grizzly Road to Darfur").

Fake farms, Fake government

Stephen Pollard on the mind-boggling corruption of the EU:

Not once since 1994 has the European Court of Auditors, the body appointed to oversee the EU’s accounts, been able to sign off the previous year’s figures as being accurate.

Indeed, questioned at the publication of the last report, the chief auditor said, matter of factly, that he could only properly account for five per cent of the total EU budget.
[...]
Dig into the pages of the past eleven years’ reports and the scale of the fraud becomes truly shocking.

Here’s a suggestion. If it looks like being an expensive Christmas, don’t worry: there’s an easy way to pay for it. There’s free money available, no questions asked (literally) from the EU taxpayer. All you need to do is pluck an imaginary name out of thin air, dream up an imaginary farm, conjure up some imaginary produce, and heh presto. Fill out a few forms, work out how much subsidy you want and the money is yours.

The EU is using some of that money to print fake schoolbooks promoting its fake constitution:

Children as young as eight are being taught that the controversial European Constitution is up and running - even though it has been rejected by voters.

More than 100,000 copies of a textbook claiming the constitution will help the EU run "like clockwork" have been distributed to primary school children on the continent.
[...]
The teaching material, entitled Europe, My Home, features two children, Lea and Thomas, who are guided through the complexities of the EU by a character called Good Father Houpette.

There is no mention of the fact that the constitution was rejected by French and Dutch voters. (via Hit & Run)

Get out while you can, Britain.

The end of "land for peace"?

That's what one of Ariel Sharon's aides is saying:

Ariel Sharon no longer regards big compromises over land as being crucial to setting up an independent Palestinian state, says one of the Israeli prime minister's closest political advisers.

Mr Arad, the prime minister's strategic policy adviser who was among those who urged the leader to quit Likud, said that Mr Sharon considered the 1993 Oslo accords, which sought peace based on Israel surrendering the territories occupied in 1967, as failed and discredited. Mr Arad said the Israeli leadership had interpreted the US-led "road map" for peace as laying out an alternative philosophy of "security for independence", meaning a "total end of the terrorist war" in return for a "Palestinian national home" but not necessarily based on the 1967 borders.
[...]
Mr Arad said: "Since 1967, almost the entire international community and at least half the public in Israel assumed the conflict would be solved based on the formula of territories for peace. It was a naive formula and presupposed that the problem between the Israelis and Palestinians was the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza strip in 1967 and therefore if you remove the occupation ... the security problem, terrorism, will go away.

"This formula is both false philosophically and naive politically. That's why when it was implemented the Oslo agreement failed ... If you look at the bare statistics, since the Oslo agreement terrorism has increased many many times."

It is not in Israel's long-term interest to maintain control over millions of angry Palestinians, so the occupation will eventually have to end. But it is hopelessly naive to accept Israel to just walk away and let the Palestinians have their state, when bitter experience suggests they will merely use it as a launching pad for more attacks. An end to the terror and incitement must come before territory is conceded, not the other way around.

Let 'em say we're crazy. What do they know?

If you know your bad '80s movies and the songs they spawned, you'll agree that the title to this post is just about perfect.

Bizarro World

In Bizarro World, up is down, hamburgers eat people, and American church leaders don't fall to their knees to praise Islamofascist killers:

On October 20, 2005, the Lebanese press reported that a delegation from the Presbyterian Church USA, headed by Father Nihad Tu'meh and with Robert Worley as its spokesman, visited southern Lebanon at the invitation of Hizbullah, and met there with the terrorist organization's commander in southern Lebanon Nabil Qawuq.
[...]
Delegation spokesman Robert Worley said: "We do not wish to defend the U.S. administration. We all elected the Democratic Party against the Republican Party. Rest assured that we will return to the U.S. in order to continue our activity for peace, and we want to hear about the charity activities and the cultural and social activities organized by Hizbullah in south [Lebanon]. The Americans hear in the Western media that Hizbullah is a terrorist organization, and they do not hear any other opinion. They know nothing about the party's concern for the people of the south. We have suffered much pressure on the part of Jewish organizations in the U.S. because [of our help in] divesting corporations working with Israel. We want Jerusalem to be a united city, just as we encouraged the Palestinians and the Jews to work for peace, and we demanded that our administration adheres to this position." [emphasis added]

Sometimes, I wish I lived in Bizarro World.

PLANES NOT JOBS: IT'S A START

I don't care why the Liberals are doing it; it's what the Air Force has asked for and desperately needs.

The federal government has announced that it will go ahead with a plan to buy about $4.6 billion worth of military transport aircraft.

They say the military's needs will be the priority, not industrial and regional benefits.

About time the military got what it should get, rather than basing decisions on extraneous factors in order to buy votes.

Join the fun!

Tim Blair is hosting "Chimpfest 2005", in which readers are asked to submit "the ultimate chimp-themed Presidential slur". My entry was "Chimpy McLikudBurton", but James Lileks (naturally) beats everyone with "Christer W. Turkeyserv". (Which doesn't actually have a chimp reference in it, but it still wouldn't look out of place on the Democratic Underground message boards.)

The Pajama Game

Open Source Media, of which I am a part, is reverting back to its old name.

A lot of excellent bloggers are running this project, and I'm proud to be affiliated with it. I can't wait to see (and participate in) more events like the Glenn Reynolds-edited "Carnival of Pre-War Intelligence" the site hosted the other day. Still, I have to admit, this has not been an auspicious beginning.

BANG! BANG! YOU'RE DEAD

I have deleted this post. Josh commented "I've seen this referenced on other sites, and there seem to be some serious doubts about its authenticity." I did some googling and he is quite right.

One site with a discussion.

I picked up the article from the Canadian Forces College daily "Spotlight on Military News and International Affairs" press round-up. It is in The Washington Times, known for its conservative stance. Publishing something that dubious is bad indeed. The "Spotlight" has also deleted the article.

Thanks Josh, and apologies to readers.

EINE KLEINE KRANKMUSIK

Finally the cat is coming out of the bag in the RoC.

The issue of public versus private health care needs to be front and centre in the next federal election campaign, says Alberta Premier Ralph Klein.

"A way other than the American system, which is demonized, a way other than the Canadian system, and let's be honest about it because Canadians deserve . . . better access to a health system that provides quality services when they need it."..

But that's "Western" so maybe the cat should stay quietly stuffed in the bag as people wait ever longer and suffer.

Yesterday, Harper was once again reminded that with friends like Ralph, who needs the Liberals?..

What Klein does know full well is how politically sensitive and potentially damaging the whole subject of private health care can be for Harper and the Conservatives going into a federal election campaign...

And sometimes die.

Ontario's emergency-room doctors are asking provincial Ombudsman André Marin to investigate cases where they say patients have died or become seriously ill while waiting for care...

Four days later, the bleeding returned and he died...

In fact the cat is already running around in British Columbia (as it is in Quebec), and is headed towards Ontario.

Amid concerns from the provincial government and public health-care advocates, a private clinic has opened its doors, charging members $2,300 a year for care.

Though Copeman maintains patients are only paying for uninsured services, he admits that doctors — who will be paid annual salaries of about $275,000, more than double the B.C. average — will be able to bill medicare for any insured services they perform...

IF ONLY THE ROC HAD A CULTURE LEFT TO RECLAIM

Multiculturalism is a drag.

BRITAIN’S first black Archbishop has made a powerful attack on multiculturalism, urging English people to reclaim their national identity.

OUT OF AFRICA
Born in 1947 into Uganda’s Buffalo Clan as John Mugabi Tucker Sentamu, one of 13 children...

Update (in response to a comment from Bruce Rheinstein):

English Canada (which has become the RoC) once had its own culture, stemming from the British connection, that distinguished it from the US. Read Robertson Davies. The Liberals from Pearson on have done their damnedest to eradicate that culture, with great success, and replace it with an empty "multiculturalism" that is no national culture at all. It is exactly that sort of development that the Archbishop is arguing against.

Of course Quebec has always had its own "national" culture.

SCOTT BRISON: A RESPONSIBLE MINISTER

Mr Brison has recently become aware of what is going on in his deparment.

Public Works Minister Scott Brison has overturned a short-lived ban on the hiring of white men by the federal department.

"When I became aware of the directive, I took immediate action and ended it," he said in Ottawa...

Update: No Whites--or Natives--Need Apply

Excerpt from a real federal job posting (not Mr Brison's department):

Classification: AS-03 (Anticipatory staffing)
Position Title: Assistant Branch Manager, Correspondence & Parliamentary Affairs
Department or Agency: Department of Health
Location: Ottawa, Ontario
Organization: Corporate Services Branch, Office of the Assistant Deputy Minister
Salary: $ 50,457 - $ 54,365 per year
Tenure
Term length: 1 year(s)

Who can apply?

**Persons employed in the Public Service occupying a position in the National Capital Region who are members of visible minority groups. As an equal opportunity employer, Health Canada is committed to achieving a skilled, diversified workforce that reflects the diversity of the Canadian population. In support of developing a diverse workforce, this opportunity is open to those persons belonging to a visible minority group. The Employment Equity Act defines members of visible minority groups as follows: "persons other than aboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour". Applicants must clearly self-identify as belonging to a visible minority group in their application...

Prepare the Bribes

With an election coming, the Liberals are opening the taps:

The Liberals were preparing a flurry of major spending announcements yesterday with their government expected to fall within a week.

He said the whirlwind of activity was about getting things done for Canadians before an election.

Meanwhile, scumsucking floor-crossing traitor Public Works Minister Scott Brison has only been a Liberal for about 18 months, but he already has the attitude down pat:

A longtime, loyal Liberal is demanding an apology from Public Works Minister Scott Brison, claiming the Nova Scotia MP told her to "kiss my ass" during a dispute in a public restaurant.

"He got very upset. He looked at me and said, 'Well I've got something to tell you: I'm going to be the MP for a very, very long time, and you can kiss my ass,'" she recalled. "We were shocked and dumbfounded. This is a cabinet minister and there's supposed to be ethics in government. If he can't take some heat from the people of Canada, he shouldn't be in cabinet." [emphasis added]

NO PROBLEM WITH REPEAT OFFENDERS

Well, by definition it's hard to get suicide bombers with experience.

Happily for Mr Zarqawi, no matter how desperate the head-hackers get, the Western defeatists can always top them. A Democrat Congressman, Jack Murtha, has called for immediate US withdrawal from Iraq. He's a Vietnam veteran, so naturally the media are insisting that his views warrant special deference, military experience in a war America lost being the only military experience the Democrats and the press value these days. Hence, the demand for the President to come up with an "exit strategy".

Anti-Bush Continentals [and Canadians] who would welcome a perceived American defeat in Iraq ought to remember the third front in this war: Europe is both a home front and a foreign battleground - as the Dutch have learnt, watching the land of the bicycling Queen transformed into 24-hour armed security for even minor municipal officials. In this war, for Europeans the faraway country of which they know little turns out to be their own. Much as the Guardian and Le Monde would enjoy it, an America that turns its back on the world is the last thing you need...

Et maintenant M. Favre encore.

MAGIC MUSHROOMS

Lorne Gunter of the National Post is surprised that Canada is the world's largest producer of uranium ore. (Scroll down.)

Then he might also be surprised to know that Canada supplied uranium for the Manhattan Engineering District.

And a good thing too.

This show won't die easy

TV Talk says the Showtime cable network may pick up Arrested Development, and that the season 1 and 2 DVDs are big sellers at Amazon.com. (You can get the first season set, packed with extras, for less than twenty bucks!)

If Family Guy can be brought back from the dead three years after it was cancelled, it's too early to write off Arrested Development just yet.

Another award for the BBC

"Misguided criminals", one of the BBC euphemisms (in place of the T-word) for the 7/7 bombers, has been named the top "Politically inCorrect" word of the year by these guys.

(via Spiegel Online)

Matthews misunderstood?

A few readers say Chris Matthews' "the person on the other side is not evil" comment may have been a reference to people on the other side of the political spectrum, not Al-Qaida. When I look at it that way, it appears to make a lot more sense - and if that is indeed what Matthews meant, I sincerely apologize.

Update: a reader of NRO's The Corner says Matthews was indeed referring to foreign enemies. Really, only the complete text of the speech would determine this issue. (That's why I've added a question mark to the post title.)

MR BRISON HAS A HIDDEN AGENDA AFTER ALL: ARE YOU SCARED?

Reptilian Kitten Eater (h/t to Warren Kinsella--yikes!)

As for the attacks against Harper [by Scott Brision] being in favour of privatized health care, there may be some truth there. Just take a look at these quotes:

There's only one problem. Those quotes aren't things Stephen Harper said. They were said by a certain MP from Kings-Hants.

The mainstream media do not report this sort of thing, and Canadians (a smaller and smaller proportion bothering with each election) keep electing these people.

An aside: Mr Brison's department has put a freeze on hiring white males. I wonder how closely the composition of his ministerial exempt staff and of his riding office comes to meeting the department's diversity "goals"?

Update: Mr Brison admits he is truth-challenged.

Public Works Minister Scott Brison stood in the House of Commons and publicly apologized for saying that Opposition Leader Stephen Harper had breached federal lobbying laws while he was head of the National Citizens' Coalition...

In the letter, he says that a statement he made saying that the National Citizens' Coalition (which Mr. Harper headed up before joining the Conservative Party) had been charged under the Canada Elections Act, was simply not true. He also said it is untrue that Mr. Harper and the NCC had contravened any federal lobbying law while he was president.

"I make the following statement as a correction and by way of apology," Mr. Brison said.

How Long Oh Lord, How Long?

There are no enemies, just friends you haven't appeased yet

I think it was Mark Steyn (who else?) who coined that phrase, and it describes Chris Matthews' political beliefs with remarkable accuracy:

Four years after 9/11 and the "crazy zeitgeist" that permeated the United States, most Americans have still not learned to know their enemies instead of just hating them, U.S. political journalist Chris Matthews says.

"If we stop trying to figure out the other side, we've given up. The person on the other side is not evil -- they just have a different perspective." [emphasis added]

Here's the thing: I have spent the last four years "trying to figure out the other side" - and the more I learn about them, there more I think there is no word more appropriate than "evil".

Correction: I may have gotten this one wrong. See here.

HUNTER-GATHERERS WITH ATVS--AND NO LIFE

The utter irrationality and fraud of Canadian native "policy":

The ongoing scandal of Canada's native reserves follows a predictable pattern. First, some particularly appalling story is revealed in the media -- say, a rash of suicides, or on-camera glue-sniffing or an epidemic of some obsolete disease that white Canada said goodbye to 50 years ago. Then, the wretchedness is held up as an example of how natives are being ignored by Ottawa, and by a racist white society more generally. And since Indian leaders and their counterparts in Ottawa can conceive of only one solution to this problem -- more money -- the only question becomes how many millions taxpayers will fork over.

Even in faraway Kashechewan...we have already destroyed the aboriginals' culture -- through television, guns, the English language, packaged food, schools, hospitals, ATVs and Christianity. None of these genies can be put back in the bottle, even if natives wanted to -- which, of course, they don't.

"How to Lose a War"

"Quit," answers Ralph Peters. This one's a keeper.

"TOO BIG TO FAIL"? MAYBE NOT YET BUT THE HURT IS COMING

Futher to Damian's post below, GM Canada is going to take a big hit.

General Motors plants in Oshawa and St. Catharines, Ont., will shut down as the automaker announced closures at twelve North American facilities and 30,000 jobs cuts on Monday.

General Motors had about 20,000 employees in this country prior to the latest cuts.

A RETIRED MARINE LT. COLONEL THINKS WASHINGTON SUCKS

This fair and balanced observer writes that politicians of both US parties are letting the troops down badly.

Since October 2001, our FOX News "War Stories" unit has documented the remarkable young Americans fighting the Global War on Terror. We have covered thousands of them on the decks of ships in the Persian Gulf, on combat patrols in the shadow of the Hindu Kush, in gunfights along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates and gone to hospitals in Iraq, Germany and the U.S. with the wounded.

Notwithstanding the "peace in our time" appeasement sentiment sweeping our capital, it's not too late...

BUT IN BOSNIA THERE HAS BEEN NO INSURGENCY, NOR SUICIDE BOMBERS

Maybe there will at last be some progress towards a real Bosnian state (I have my doubts)--because the US cares more about Bosnia than Iraq?

Ten years ago today the leaders of three hostile ethnic and religious communities in a war-ravaged land reluctantly agreed -- thanks to overwhelming U.S. military and political pressure -- to stop fighting and live together under their country's first-ever democratic government. The Dayton accords, which created a fragile confederation and ended Bosnia's civil war, have been successful enough to earn two days of high-level ceremonies in Washington, including a gala luncheon tomorrow at the State Department hosted by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. It's hard to avoid the comparison between the country deemed a quagmire in the 1990s and the one where the United States is bogged down today...

Perhaps they [the Bosnian leaders visiting Washington] will conclude that their tiny Balkan country is far more important to the United States and its security than Iraq. That, anyway, is what the record shows.

MEMO TO GLOBE'S JEFF SALLOT: A GLOBEMASTER III IS NOT A HERCULES

Letter just sent to the Globe and Mail:

'The story by Jeff Sallot in the print edition of the Globe, "Ottawa to announce purchase of planes, sources say" (Nov. 21), makes the ludicrous statement that the two types of transport plane under consideration are the C-17J and the A-400. Since there is no "J" model of the C-17, and since it is made by Boeing--not Lockheed Martin as the story says, perhaps there was a typo for C-130J. Or else Mr Sallot is revealing his profound ignorance of matters military. The Lockheed Martin C-130J is in fact the other aircraft under consideration. Stephen Thorne's excellent CP story in your online edition, "Streamlined military purchase to go ahead" (Nov. 20, 5:30 PM EST) correctly identifies the two contenders.

By the way, the actual unit price of the C-130J is around C$ 80 million. Thus 16 planes would cost $1.28 billion. The $4.6 billion figure in the stories includes life-cycle costs such as spares, maintenance, training etc.

One prays that at least this portion of the plans to re-equip the Air Force can go through quickly.'

Update: The Globe prints a correction (but not the letter).

A nation under siege

The Netherlands might be the most tolerant nation on earth, but speaking out against radical Islam can still get you killed:

A film about gay rights should hardly raise an eyebrow in The Netherlands, which for centuries has prided itself as a beacon of freedom of expression and was the first country to legalise gay marriage.

Now, many politicians, writers and artists are considered to be in such danger that they have permanent armed guards and are driven around in bomb-proof armoured cars. The Interior Ministry has set up a special unit assessing death threats from Islamic extremists and providing protection squads.
[...]
In the parliament in The Hague, inside the airport-style security, two besuited bodyguards stand erect outside the office of Geert Wilders, Ali's political rival, checking closely anyone who has permission to enter. "I have been deluged with death threats," said the maverick right-wing MP, who has called for the deportation of Islamic extremists.

"In The Netherlands, terrorists want to threaten not only the public ... they also want to kill public figures, such as artists, academics and politicians," he said. "It is not special in terms of Islam -- in Iran, it is normal to kill people who criticise Islam, as in Egypt and Iraq. It is legitimised by Islamic political theology, which says it is all right to kill someone if they are an enemy of Allah. But this is happening in Europe."

No story on this subject would be complete without the obligatory quote from a university professor who implies that it's all the victims' own fault for being so provocative:

A study by Frank Bovenkerk of the University of Utrecht confirmed the rise in death threats across the country, and their seriousness.

"There is self-censorship." [emphasis added]

There is no freedom of speech without "freedom of cursing". But thank God Ms. Hirsi Ali, whose bravery cannot adequately be described in mere words, is getting so much support from the brave dissidents of Hollywood, who are fighting so strongly to protect freedom of expression from Chimpy McLikudburton and the neocon cabal.

They do talk about Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Theo van Gogh in Hollywood, right?

"Too big to fail"

That's what people always said about General Motors, even during the company's darkest moments, but recent weeks have seen rampant speculation that the company may file for bankruptcy protection:

The rumors that GM would be forced to file for bankruptcy have swirled through the financial community over the past two weeks in the wake of the automaker's disclosure it planned to restate income for 2001. Too, the bankruptcy of Delphi Corp. has shaken confidence in GM's overall strategy at a time when competition in the car business is intense and consumer demand for vehicles has begun to soften.

In another blow to GM, Standard & Poor's also warned it was keeping GM and its finance arm GMAC on review for downgrade, citing the concerns about the company's lack of profitability and a possible strike at Delphi. GM also is facing deterioration in its product mix in North America, declining market share and the burden of legacy costs for pensions and retiree healthcare, analysts noted.

When historians look back at what went wrong with a company that once had over 50% of the American new-car market, I predict they'll focus on the early 1970s and early 1980s, when GM introduced new small cars that were supposed to stomp the Japanese for good. They gave us the Vega and the Cavalier.

Can anyone save this company? Maybe Carlos Ghosn, who turned around Nissan, can do it.

Update: more GM links at InstaPundit.

Can Iraq be saved?

A dispatch by one of the best reporters based in the country, John Burns of the New York Times, offers mixed news at best:

American forces, he said, had heard the stories of secret prisons and torture, many of them telephoned to hotlines set up last year for tips in the hunt for insurgents. The center, in Jadriya, he said, was "notorious" before the raid was triggered by a mother's appeal for help in finding her 15-year-old son. So why wasn't it raided sooner? Because, the general said in so many words, Iraq is so washed by rumor, and fact is so elusive, that the 153,000 American troops here have simply been overwhelmed.
[...]
The irony is that plans for an Iraqi takeover are accelerating just as American troops seem to be developing more effective ways of fighting the war. Compared to 18 months ago, the American grasp of the war's complex tribal, ethnic, political and religious hinterland has advanced considerably. Intelligence officers now talk assuredly about inter-tribal rivalries and links between Baathist financiers, Islamic militants and criminal gangs. They display "rogues' galleries" of insurgent cell leaders and where they operate.

But what they don't know still weighs heavily against what they do know. Until very recently, American commanders insisted that the suicide bombings here were the work, almost exclusively, of Islamic militants from abroad. But last week an Iraqi woman confessed to being part of an Iraqi suicide-bombing squad that attacked three hotels in the Jordanian capital, Amman. The American command then acknowledged, in the words of one high-ranking officer, that the earlier assessments were based on little more than prideful assertions by Iraqis that their fellow citizens could never do anything so crazy as to blow themselves up, and on "people who came to us after a bombing and said, 'That's not an Iraqi foot,' or 'That's a Syrian hand.'"

(via Andrew Sullivan)

Sharon leaves Likud

An Israeli political bombshell:

Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, is to quit his ruling Likud party to run separately in national elections.

Israel's Labour party paved the way for an early general election by voting on Sunday to pull out of the government, ending a 10-month coalition that allowed Mr Sharon to push through the unilateral withdrawal of Israeli troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip.

Statement Made

Bears 13, Panthers 3. So much for that "the Bears can't beat anyone with a winning record" nonsense.

By the way, if you're not watching the Colts-Bengals game right now (around 6PM Eastern), you're missing a classic.

Update: Colts 45, Bengals 37. What a game.

Keep your fingers crossed

Boy, do I hope this one is true:

The Elaph Arab media website reported on Sunday that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of the al-Qaida in Iraq terror group, may have been killed in Iraq on Sunday afternoon when eight terrorists blew themselves up in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.

If Chrenkoff was still blogging, this would definitely qualify for "Good News from Iraq".

Update: the Americans are skeptical.

Paris and Toronto (continued)

Jamal Hemmings, the 17 year old father of a two-month-old baby was shot dead in Toronto on November 9. At his funeral, on November 18, gunmen shot and killed his best friend, Amon Beckles, the 18-year-old father of an 18-month-old daughter.

This is only the latest in a long series of shootings and murders in the city. Some people are blaming the government:

"We've made the point over and over about the rate at which our young men are dying but the response from the government shows they are not taking it seriously," says Sandra Carnegie-Douglas, president of the Jamaican-Canadian Association and a founder of the Coalition of African-Canadian Organizations.

"If these were young white men who were dying at that rate, we would have a national crisis on our hands. Look at the response to SARS, the way the city, the province and the federal government mobilized. We just have not seen this response to the fact we are losing our children."

But, Andrew King, the pastor of the church at which Jamal's funeral was held, had a different message.

Outside the auditorium, the pastor said even more: that it's time for people in the community to start offering information to the police providing the names of those responsible for the violence.

"We are the only ones that can stop this from happening. People know and people need to talk. I am convinced of that," he said.

"The biggest problem is people are not speaking. And if we start to stand up, you know what? The fear will be removed away. Because right now, people are living in fear: `Oh, I'm not going to say anything because I might be next.'"

It's well known in Toronto that the investigation of shootings has suffered from a lack of witnesses even when the killings have taken place in public view. Apparently, the witnesses are afraid of reprisals. Can the police protect them? I haven't seen any articles addressing this issue.

Back in August, Greg Morrow of Democratic Space surveyed the different lines of thought about the shooting spree.

CRICKET MOMS: THIS COUNTRY IS GETTING THE RIGHT IMMIGRANTS

Why cricket is a reflection of a good immigrant selection policy:

Dressed all in white, arm whirling like a propeller, the bowler sends a cricket ball screaming down the pitch and past the hapless batter.

Devotees tout the sport as a well-mannered alternative to more ruffianly pursuits...

I wonder if some of the moms also drive SUVs.

DO YOU RECOGNIZE THIS COUNTRY?

And in the whole article (h/t to Norman Spector) Henry Porter, who also writes spy thrillers, never once mentions Quebec.

When you get to Canada, the clamour stops. Suddenly, you find yourself in the place that America should be and once was, though it would offend every American to think that Canada has anything the US should want.

Just at the moment, Canadians seem to have got things about right.

I doubt Mr Porter has checked the statistics on voter participation in recent federal elections. Brits seem congenitally unable to know Canada.

Update: This view seems parallel to Mr Porter's: Canada - the atlas of communities is superb - a forgotten but beautiful country (scroll down to "Places - Worldwide"). The source may be a bit surprising.

KASH MAY NOT BE THE ANSWER

If $4 billion is required just to battle Native poverty, what might it take to win?

The package, which sources say may reach $5-billion by the time it is made final, will be unveiled Friday [November 25] at the end of a two-day first ministers meeting devoted entirely to improving natives' living standards...

"The minute you recognize our economic and treaty rights, our poverty would disappear immediately."...

And what work would result? Is it a matter of simply collecting rents? How to divvy up the loot? Some Native communities might get large rents, others might not.

"Money for nothin' and chicks for free [see Peterborough below]" somehow does not seem a recipe for long-term societal improvement (cf. Saudi Arabia).

If the water is safe at Kashechewan why are residents not returning rapidly?

More than 1,000 Kashechewan residents who were removed from their homes will stay in hotel rooms and dormitories across Ontario, even though the reserve's deputy chief acknowledged its water is safe to drink...

Dressed entirely in new clothes, save for a sweatshirt he brought from home, the teen highlighted the features of his old home and his temporary home northeast of Toronto, where there's shopping, stop signs, and places to go at night. A similar night at home? “We wouldn't go nowhere. It's boring.”

How're you goin' keep them up on the res after they've seen PO? I feel sad even writing something that cynical.

Why were the residents evacuated in the first place? (Scroll down to "HOW KASHECHEWAN CREATED A POLITICAL STAMPEDE".)

...it looks more and more as if governments overreacted, succumbing to an orchestrated media campaign and airlifting hundreds of residents out of the settlement for no reason...

The money spent on evacuation would be well justified if the residents of Kashechewan were in any real danger. They are not. Whatever the problems on the reserve, and they are profound, the water is now clean and there is no reason why people should not remain in their homes. Instead, they are being uprooted from the place they know best and scattered like refugees around the province -- all because governments feared being accused of neglect.

To sum up (note all reporting is from the eminently reasonable Globe and Mail): There was no need to evacuate. The Ontario and federal governments panicked in the face of yet more television pictures showing the terrible living conditions of some Natives. The water problem was rapidly fixed. The evacuees (surprise, surprise) are in no hurry to return.

And the federal Liberal government is now willing to throw even larger amounts of cash at Native problems with absolutely no reason to believe that any significant amelioration of their conditions will occur.

How Long, Oh Lord, How Long?

'Toon of the day

Political cartoons courtesy Artizans Entertainment

OSM WTF

I've been watching with bemused interest the reaction to the newly launched OSM, aka Open Source Media, nee Pajamas Media. I'm sure most readers here know about the name controversy, the very vocal former business partner, and the harsh judgement passed by some of blogdom's heavy hitters. A discouraging start for what was touted as a new media powerhouse.

But to those of us who don't particularly care whether OSM is a good business model, what matters is whether it's a website worth visiting. I hesitate to judge a site harshly based on a few days' existence, but with $3.5 mil in venture capital and a swanky launch party, I don't think they deserve kid gloves.

Put aside whether you support the individuals running OSM or the 70 affiliated bloggers (and it should go without saying that I support Damian), and evaluate OSM on its merits as a site. Does it work? Will I bookmark it and return regularly? I largely agree with JohnnyMC at Private Radio:

It’s hard to fathom such a talented group creating a more clunky and boring web site. The proof is in the pudding and there’s nothing to see there. Compiled by OSM staff? [Prev] [Next] buttons. Drab colors. Old news. Reynolds will be ringmaster for a blogjam on Monday? The topic? Pre-war military intelligence–what was known going into the war in Iraq, who knew it, and more importantly, what should we have known that we didn’t?

Is that old news?

That pretty much sums it up for me. In this incarnation, at least, OSM doesn't offer a whole lot that would draw me back. News aggregation? Summaries of blog reaction to news? Does OSM do these things better than existing services? There's nothing there -- yet -- that interests me as a reader.

So, is it worth visiting? Discuss.

NO HIDDEN AGENDA: SCOTT BRISON'S CANADA

These two stories really do speak volumes about where our country is heading and the impossibility of intelligent political debate.

Public Works and Government Services Canada (Scott Brison is minister) has a hiring freeze on, of all things, white males.

Managers in the Public Works department must hire only visible minorities, women, aboriginals and the disabled, except with written permission from their superiors, David Marshall, the deputy minister, ordered in an e-mail circulated yesterday.

"This measure will be in force until March 31, 2006, at which time we will re-assess our progress."

Meanwhile Mr Brison defines his progressive Canada that makes such measures necessary.

In a harbinger of the mudslinging that could shape this winter's expected federal election, a senior Liberal cabinet minister on Friday attacked Conservative Leader Stephen Harper as a socially conservative dinosaur opposed to gay and charter rights...

The Conservatives, he argued, would undo the progress if elected...

So questioning whether policies are actually effective and beneficial "would turn Canada's social clock back in time"? If only the Conservatives had the courage to debate these things openly; but they do not. It seems to me that a democracy within which the scope of debate is so increasingly circumscribed becomes less and less a democracy at all.

Mr Brison calls Mr Harper "a socially conservative dinosaur". Once again a Liberal elevating the tone of public discourse. But he's not angry.

Update: Brison ran for the leadership of the Progressive Conservatives [2003] on a platform of...privatisation of healthcare.

Autre temps, autres mœurs.

THE GRIZZLY ROAD TO DARFUR

Paul Martin announced in May that Canada would provide military assistance to help in Darfur, Sudan. Finally that help is en route.

The first of more than a 100 Canadian armoured personnel carriers are on their way to Sudan to be used by African Union peacekeepers in the Darfur region...

It is costing the federal government $15.5 million to rent the cargo planes and it is expected to take about a month to move the vehicles, spare parts and ammunition into Sudan...

The story so far:

In May Paul Martin, in his fruitless effort to buy David Kilgour's vote in the House, promised that Canada would send around 100 troops to Sudan as advisers to the African Union (AU) peacekeeping mission in Darfur. Sudan refused to let them in.

Then in June the government said it would try to send around 100 clapped-out surplus Grizzly armoured personnel carriers, which have been in storage for six years, to the AU forces in Sudan. It just didn't know how it would get them there. And since Sudan still refused to let Canadian troops in, the government suggested the Canadian Forces might train AU troops on the Grizzlies in third countries. Or maybe contracted civilians could provide the training. Or maybe the government would find APCs from other countries and somehow get those to Sudan.

Finally, on July 28, Defence Minister Bill Graham announced the loan of the 105 armoured vehicles to African Union forces for use in Sudan. In September the vehicles arrived by ship in Senegal and 67 Canadian troops were sent to train African Union soldiers there on operating the vehicles. The training was completed in late September.

This is part of Canadian Forces' "Operation Augural".

We eventually learned on November 15 from the Globe and Mail's Washington correspondent that Sudanese government opposition had been keeping the Grizzlies in Senegal and that US government pressure was necessary to have the Sudanese government let the vehicles be sent.

I wonder if our government will give the Americans due credit for this action, without which our effort to help militarily in congo might still be fruitless.

It was odd that our government never told the public about the reason for the delay, and that no journalist in Ottawa bothered to find out. It was also odd that the story came out through a reporter in Washington and that none of the sources was Canadian.

And of course it is a pity the Canadian Air Force has no transport aircraft available to move the Grizzlies. And that politics, Liberal, Conservative and Bombardier has postponed any decision on new aircraft for the Air Force.

Update: Canadian Forces' video and photos of Grizzlies in Senegal.

Update II: Peace Force In Darfur Faces Major Challenges: African Troops Stymied By Shortages, Mission. Picture of Canadian Grizzly but no mention of Canada in the story itself.

THE FRENCH CONNECTION: IT'S GETTING CLOSER TO KOFI

Odd indeed that it has not been reported in the main Canadian and US media that the former French ambassador to the UN and then special adviser to Secretaary General Kofi Annan has admitted to accepting some $200,000 from Iraq in 2002 (Daily Telegraph).

One of France's most distinguished diplomats has confessed to an investigating judge that he accepted oil allocations from Saddam Hussein, it emerged yesterday.

Inquiries have also found that French firms benefited disproportionately from oil-for-food contracts as part of an Iraqi policy to influence French votes on the UN Security Council...

One would love to know details of any Russian oil-for-food connections.

VOLPE LIED! VOLPE LIED!

And politics and immigration continue to mix very well indeed.

James Travers in the Toronto Star shows that the immigration minister is playing very fast and loose with statistics about the economic success of recent immigrants to Canada.

Most questionably Volpe is tripling family re-unification for parents and grandparents: poor economic performers (grandparents? who'd a thunk it) and the most likely heavy users of the collapsing health care system (my thought, not Travers'):

With a winter election looming and Liberals desperate to hold the ethnic vote, Immigration Minister Joe Volpe is telling fanciful stories about the success of immigrants that just don't fit the facts. Volpe, who also happens to be Paul Martin's Ontario political boss, is promoting the notions that new arrivals are doing rather well and that Canada is ready to throw its doors open to a swelling new crowd.

Questions about why immigrants fare so poorly outstrip answers. Equally worrying, there is no reason to believe that Ottawa has any immediate hope of matching applicant skills to labour market demands or channelling immigrants to regions that current residents are abandoning.

In Question Period November 17 the Conservatives asked not one question about this, no doubt for fear of being labelled racist rednecks.

Also in QP a Conservative suggested the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Andy Scott, should take his finger out of his butt (Keeseekoose Education Fund theft). Liberal blogging language reaches the House of Commons. The Speaker simply moved quickly to the next questioner, obviating any reply by Mr Scott.

Update: There is an excellent column in the Ottawa Citizen, Nov. 18, "Immigration crisis in France is a warning to Canada", by James Bisset who was head of the Canadian Immigration Service, 1985-90.

Sadly the text is not free online.

An excerpt: "Immigration has become one of those subjects that ordinary Canadians are not allowed to talk about. To do so runs the risk of being branded as anti-immigrant or even racist. Our House of Commons immigration committee studiously avoids asking any economists or demographers to appear before it, fearing that to do so might expose the committee so some of the facts about immigration."

On second thought, religion and politics can mix after all

After years of saying it's "un-Canadian" to let personal religious beliefs influence policy, and portraying the party that wants a Christmas election campaign as a bunch of right-wing, radical Christian religious nuts, Paul Martin now says a Christmas election campaign could be offensive to religious groups:

Prime Minister Paul Martin warned the three opposition leaders today that they could offend religious and ethnic groups by forcing an election over the holiday season.

"It's up to the opposition. I don't want a Christmas election."

There is nothing a Liberal won't say if he thinks it will help him get re-elected. Nothing.

Guest-blogging

I have yet another one of these lengthy business trips coming up (Halifax on Friday and Saturday, and then the Northern Peninsula for a week), so after today I'll be away until Friday, Nov. 25. I'm staying in at least one hotel with wireless internet access, so I'll still post when I can, but in the meantime I've press-ganged some friends and frequent commenters to blog for me while I'm gone. Later!

Week 11

Last week I was 7-7 - better than I thought, actually - for a season record of 75-69.

Arizona at St. Louis - I actually watched some of the Cards/Lions game last week. You know you're in trouble when Joey Harrington makes you look bad.
Carolina at Chicago - upset special. This is the Bears' first big test after five straight wins over five lousy teams - but they'll have the cold (and, hopefully, snow) on their side.
Detroit at Dallas
Jacksonville at Tennessee - has anyone even noticed the Jags are 6-3?
Miami at Cleveland - once again, I'm taking the weather.
New Orleans at New England
Oakland at Washington
Philadelphia at NY Giants - starting QB for the Eagles this week: Mike McMahon. I presume Jim wasn't available.
Tampa Bay at Atlanta - to be honest, I'm not sure Alstott really made it in last week, but God bless Gruden for going for it.
Pittsburgh at Baltimore
Seattle at San Francisco
Indianapolis at Cincinnati - the Colts gotta lose sometime, so it might as well be to a 7-2 team playing at home. (Yes, I saw the Bengals-Steelers game a few weeks ago.)
Buffalo at San Diego
NY Jets at Denver
Kansas City at Houston
Minnesota at Green Bay - a great argument for not setting the Monday-night schedule until after the season has started.

Lott, Rather, Sony

It's not politicians and journalists who can be brought low by the blogosphere. Sony BMG, one of the world's largest music companies, was forced into a humiliating retreat over copy-protection software because of overwhelming opposition from bloggers:

Sony's decision to withdraw its controversial copy-protected CDs followed weeks of flames by bloggers.

"It seems crystal clear that but for the citizen journalists, Sony never would have done anything about this," says Fred von Lohmann, senior intellectual property attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a cyber liberties advocacy group that has been vocal in its condemnation of Sony and may eventually file a a lawsuit against Sony, in addition to three that have already been filed. "It's plain to me that it was Sony's intent to brush the story under the rug and forget about it."

GM Bankruptcy?

THIS is big news: GM may face bankruptcy due to lagging sales, heavy worker costs, and a possible strike from Delphi, itself facing the block.

From WaPo:

"GM Bankruptcy Fears Rising on Wall Street

By ALEKSANDRS ROZENS
The Associated Press
Tuesday, November 15, 2005; 5:48 PM

"NEW YORK -- An increasing number of investors are betting that General Motors Corp. may be forced to seek bankruptcy protection within the next 12 months as it struggles with slumping sales and high health care costs for workers and retirees.

Concerns about the future of the world's largest automaker are showing up in the credit default swaps market, where investors effectively buy insurance protection against defaults. Holders of GM debt who want to arrange a hedge against the risk that they won't be repaid are finding that the cost of buying the protection has risen dramatically in recent days."

From Breitbart:

"GM shares hit lowest level since crash of Oct 1987
Nov 16 7:42 PM US/Eastern

"Shares of struggling General Motors closed at their lowest level in nearly two decades as investors reacted to a strike threat at its largest auto parts supplier."

____

So is that "Read the Whole Thing" or "Read 'em and weep"?

Polls, Polls, Polls

The opinion surveys are coming fast and furious...

Pollara: Prime Minister Paul Martin's Liberals retain their narrow lead in popular support, despite the kickback scandal that has rocked the minority government, a new poll showed on Tuesday. ...The survey, taken November 7-13, put the Liberals at 36 percent, the Conservatives at 28 percent and the New Democrats at 20 percent. In Quebec, the separatist Bloc Quebecois have a crushing lead of 64 percent to 23 percent over the Liberals.

SES/Sun Media: A Sun Media-SES Research poll shows support for the Liberals now stands at 34%, down from 40% just days before Justice John Gomery tabled his blistering report on Nov. 1. The NDP climbed five points to 20% while the Conservatives are stalled at 28%.

Decima: Liberals 33 per cent, Conservatives 26, NDP 22, and Bloc Quebecois 13. ...Under a January-February election scenario, Liberal support actually rose a point to 34 per cent, the Conservatives remained static at 26 and the New Democrats fell two points to 20 per cent. ...Some 58 per cent overall said they'd prefer an election in late March or early April - Prime Minister Paul Martin's preferred timetable. Just 28 per cent said they wanted a January or February date.

This election is winnable for the Conservatives, but we're not doing nearly as well as we should be under the circumstances. The big winner in every poll? Jack Layton and the NDP. The best news for the Tories is that, according to the SES/Sun poll, a growing number of Canadians hold the entire Liberal Party of Canada responsible for Adscam:

Another 48% believe only a "few bad apples" are to blame for the corruption -- a 10% slide over the same period.
[...]
On May 4, 29% thought Martin was solely to blame for the scandal compared to only 8% on Nov. 13, two weeks after Gomery tabled his report. Another 24% fingered Chretien, while 54% of Canadians believe the pair is mutually responsible.

SES president Nik Nanos said the survey results will force Grit strategists to play down the party logo and talk up their leader as the campaign unfolds in coming weeks. That could prove to be a challenge, since the three pillars of any election are party, policy and leader.

(links via NealeNews)

America's propaganda nightmare

After several days of denials, the U.S. military has admitted it used White Phosporous as a weapon in Fallujah after all. It maintains that it did not use WP against civilians, and I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on that point - but as the London Times notes, the damage to America's image may be incalculable. Who needs George Galloway or John Pilger, when America's armed forces keep scoring own-goals like this?

How damaged is the US by the row over its use of white phosphorus in Fallujah last year? On the facts available now, it is within the letter of the law, even though it has not signed the most relevant protocol on the use of the weapon.

Worse: the muddle of official denials, followed by an admission of use (in a limited sense), has fuelled those who disbelieve every American assertion.

Scott Burgess, who has been following this controversy for days, has more.

Update: the Washington Post's William Arkin has an insightful post on the subject. (via Protein Wisdom)

The new face of Quebec separatism

Andre Boisclair, who is openly gay and has admitted to using cocaine while serving as a cabinet minister under Lucien Bouchard, is the new leader of the Parti Quebecois.

I'm perfectly cool with his sexuality. The cocaine stuff is a bit more troubling, considering that he was using it while serving in an important government post, but I guess it's forgivable if he's cleaned up. But the dedicated-to-breaking-up-Canada-and-while-we're-
at-it-using-fascist-legislation-to-make-sure-our-little-French-
paradise-isn't-poisoned-by-inferior-languages stuff? That I can't forgive.

Not for our fragile little minds

When Sirius satellite radio comes to Canada in 2006, the King of All Media(TM) won't be there:

The superstar American shock-jock becomes the king of satellite radio in the U.S. in January, courtesy of a $500-million deal with Sirius Satellite Radio.

But Sirius Canada, which plans to start beaming to your car and home before the end of this year, has no plans to include Stern and his no-holds-barred morning show that includes the likes of Stuttering John, Baba Booey and butt-bongo stunts.
[...]
So, Sirius Canada, isn't this like acquiring the Pittsburgh Penguins and deciding you don't need Sidney Crosby?

"When we applied for a licence, the CRTC pushed us about this," he said. "(Stern) was definitely a topic of conversation. We (Standard) are a big broadcaster and have to deal with the CRTC on other issues. And the CBC obviously has a cultural mandate to be concerned with."

If I decided to get Sirius satellite radio, it's not like I'd listen to Howard Stern every day. I'm just furious that some bureaucrat tells me, a grown man (honest!), that I can't.

At least the CRTC hasn't claimed jurisdiction over the internet. (Not yet, anyway, though all bets are off if the Liberals win a majority government.) So what's stopping Canadians from subscribing to the U.S. service and listening to Stern online?

Update: on this issue, Zerb and I are on the same side. It's in Revelations, people!

Next, the designers of the Titanic will teach us how to build ships

Joe Clark, forgotten but not gone, is telling anyone who will listen (six or seven people, tops) about the right way to handle a minority-government situation:

Former Tory prime minister Joe Clark says there is no credible future prime minister among the leaders of the three Opposition parties -- Conservative Stephen Harper, the NDP's Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe of the Bloc Quebecois.

The outrage that wasn't

WTOP, a Maryland radio station, says the alleged incident in which Black Republican Michael Steele had Oreo cookies thrown at him was exaggerated:

According to numerous reports in the Washington Times, Steele was "pelted" with Oreo cookies, which signifies a racial slur for being black on the outside and white on the inside.

"I've never claimed that I was hit, no. The one or two that I saw at my feet were there. I just happened to look down and see them," Steele said.

Even "one or two" Oreos thrown is a grotesque, insulting smear, and this still doesn't excuse some of the rhetoric directed at Steele on "liberal" websites. But it looks like the Washington Times - always controversial, because of its pro-Republican stance and Moonie ownership - blew this one way out of proportion.

Some days, South Park looks like a documentary

Maybe talk of a "War on Christmas" is a bit much, as Cathy Young explains in a typically well-reasoned post. But what can I say about stories like this?

Swiss Santa Clauses have been banned from sitting children on their laps because of the risk that they might be accused of paedophilia. The Society of St Nicholases issued the ruling to its 100 professional members after parents expressed concern about close contact between their children and the men.

(via Samizdata)

An Iraqi disgrace

No one expected Iraq to turn into Sweden overnight. But it's disheartening, to say the least, to read stories like this almost two years after Saddam was captured:

Up to 200 starving Iraqis bearing signs of torture have been found in an apparently secret jail in Baghdad in circumstances reminiscent of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

When US forces arrived, officials said that only 40 detainees were being held. But as troops moved through the building, opening door after door, they found scores of prisoners, many in very poor health. The Americans had apparently been tipped off to the prison’s existence by relatives of those being detained there.
[...]
But the discovery of an apparently illegal detention centre has raised even more questions over the behaviour of the security forces in Iraq, which are being primed to take over duties from a withdrawing coalition force.

Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the Prime Minister, said that there would be an investigation into allegations that Interior Ministry officials had tortured detainees held in the basement prison in connection with the mostly Sunni insurgency.

Juan Cole's mad obsession

The president of the Middle East Studies Association is throughly taken down here. If Cole is sick of being tarred as "anti-semitic", maybe he should think twice about writing "the Joooooos control America!" garbage like this:

No American media will report the demonstrations in Israel as fascist in nature, and no American politicians will dare criticize the Likud. But the fact is that the Israeli predations in the West Bank and Gaza are a key source of rage in the Muslim world against the United States (which toadies unbearably to whatever garbage comes out of Tel Aviv's political establishment), something that the 9-11 commission report stupidly denies.

And this:

[The Larry Franklin espionage scandal] is an echo of the one-two punch secretly planned by the pro-Likud faction in the Department of Defense. First, Iraq would be taken out by the United States, and then Iran. David Wurmser, a key member of the group, also wanted Syria included. These pro-Likud intellectuals concluded that 9-11 would give them carte blanche to use the Pentagon as Israel's Gurkha regiment, fighting elective wars on behalf of Tel Aviv (not wars that really needed to be fought, but wars that the Likud coalition thought it would be nice to see fought so as to increase Israel's ability to annex land and act aggressively, especially if someone else's boys did the dying).

And this:

The rightwing Zionists want to racialize the Sudan conflict in American terms, as "Arab" versus "black African" because they want to use it to play American domestic politics and create a rift among African-Americans and Arab-Americans.

And this:

If Rice is going to be a successful Secretary of State, she simply has to get back control of US foreign policy from the Likudniks in the Bush administration.

Just to be clear, none of this was written by some ultra-right-wing hatemonger or tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorist. The author is president of the Middle East Studies Association. (His academic qualifications for same include his stunning thesis that the 9/11 attacks were inspired by the Jenin "massacre" - which, um, occurred about seven months after 9/11.)

Update: no one, and I mean no one, can rip Cole to shreds like Anton Efendi (whatever happened to "Tony"?) at Across the Bay.

The Big Day

Open Source Media - a much better name than "Pajamas Media", I must say - officially launches today. As one of the approximately 70 bloggers whose work will be affiliated with this new venture, I'm excited to see how it turns out.

Update: the new site is up and running at osm.org. You can listen to streaming audio of the official launch at 10AM Eastern. (Sadly, work commitments will keep me from doing so.)

A Clockwork Orange come to life

Reason's Tim Cavanaugh compares the French rioting to the Anthony Burgess novel, and says the chaos has more to do with the French welfare state than radical Islam:

So you've got underemployed but well fed kids with plenty of time on their hands, the depraved indifference of a welfare state that usurps the role of parents but provides no useful structure for the youth, a housing-project culture that sees itself (not without reason) as a defenseless ward of the state, politicians who veer between mealy-mouthed coddling of sociopaths and vicious denunciation of people with legitimate grievances, and kids who react to it all with theatrical violence. Clearly, the last century's great prophetic novel was not George Orwell's 1984 but Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange.
[...]
You could hear echoes of that despair in recent weeks, as liberals expressed surprise at the burning of public schools and civic centers. After all, why would these crazy kids destroy the very bounty that the state has provided for them? Burgess' supreme insight was that, despite the popularity of the phrase "grinding poverty," poverty in a modern state is almost never grinding. One of my first reactions, when watching the Kubrick movie in high school, was to envy Alex the vast amount of leisure time his truant lifestyle seemed to afford him. What drives the rioters in France may be Islam, it may be a lack of opportunity, or the disrespect of the wider culture, or alienation from the keepers of "Gallic pride" (whatever that is). It's probably some combination of all those things, and a few others. The one thing that definitely isn't driving any of the rioters is an empty stomach.

But there is an even clearer pattern of a welfare structure that sings the praises of the nation while discouraging recipients from feeling any connection to the nation—a one-size-fits-all style of governance that cultivates, if it doesn't actually breed, anti-social behavior. The French government makes a particularly choice target for schadenfreude: With one hand it fails to make cité residents to feel like full citizens (by, for example, ensuring an Arabic-sounding name is not a barrier to a good job), and on the other it enforces fake national unity on pointless matters (by banning headscarves in public schools). But the pattern repeats itself everywhere the state provides for the basic needs of its outsider groups while standing in the way of their pursuit of happiness. [emphasis added]

Now, I am one of these people mocked by Cavanaugh in his very first sentence, who regularly uses the term "Islamofascist" without irony. But I think he's on to something here. If most of the rioters were indeed morivated by radical Islam (as opposed to chanting "Allahu Akbar!" and praising Osama bin Laden for shock value, like the headbangers I knew in high school who drew swastikas on their exercise books) I think the chaos would be much, much worse. These guys want to make trouble, but they don't want to be "martyrs".

Quote of the Day

Bob Tarantino on the Liberal tax cuts: "if the Conservatives can't implement their agenda, we might as well have the Liberals do it."

On that subject, Greg Weston makes an interesting observation today:

As expected, the Liberals are promising personal tax cuts that would amount to at least $325 this year for most folk, a little more for families.

Just happens those personal tax reductions are being made retroactive to Jan. 1, 2005. That means millions of average Canadian taxpayers will be getting an extra rebate when they file their 2005 tax returns next April -- golly, right around the time Martin wants to hold an election. [emphasis added]

A costly lesson

Dennis Prager bemoans the fact that it took a brutal terrorist attack in Jordan, in which the overwhelming majority of the victims were Arab Muslims, to make other Arabs realize they weren't immune to Islamofascist terror:

Jordanians are shocked that Islamic terrorists would blow up families, including families celebrating a wedding. They are so shocked that for the first time in history, Muslims have taken to publicly demonstrating against Islamic terror. [Actually, there have been anti-terror demonstrations in Iraq, though they've recieved so little media attention you can almost excuse Prager for not having heard of them. - DJP]

And why are they shocked? Because the terrorists blew up Jordanians. As long as Islamic terrorists blew up men, women and children who are Jewish, Christian, Hindu, American, Australian and black Sudanese, the Arab and larger Muslim worlds were not particularly disturbed. In fact, Palestinians, who comprise the majority of Jordan's population, celebrated when Jews were blown up at Passover seders and at weddings. And they took to the streets and cheered in the Palestinian fashion, handing out candy, when Americans were incinerated in office buildings.
[...]
These arguments of the Left, the Arab world and countless other Muslims have given the Islamic terrorists the moral green light to continue their atrocities.

Now there is widespread condemnation of Zarqawi's terror in Jordan. There is even a fear that the name of Islam will suffer. Unfortunately, however, it is only because Zarqawi was foolish enough to massacre Jordanian civilians, and not confine his massacres to Iraqis and non-Arabs. What has aroused Arab voices against Zarqawi has nothing to do with the immorality of blowing up people celebrating at a wedding -- it has to do with the immorality of blowing up Muslims celebrating at a wedding.

I know you are, but what am I?

Tex has another post on his online arguments with former Green Party election candidate Thom Lyons, who's starting to exhibit the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia.

The Alito Wars

If the confirmation battle hasn't already been ugly enough, this should put it over the top:

As a young lawyer in the Reagan administration, Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote that "the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion," declared his firm opposition to certain affirmative action programs, and strongly endorsed a government role in "protecting traditional values."

The letter was included in 168 pages of documents released yesterday by the National Archives. The documents portray an ideologically committed conservative and offer the first public articulation of Alito's personal political philosophy as he portrayed it five years before his appointment as a federal appeals court judge.

The Post notes that Alito's rulings on abortion, as an appeals-court judge, have been mixed - he issued a controversial dissent which would have upheld a Pennsylvania spousal-notification law, but he has also voted to overturn several statutes restricting the right to abortion. Doesn't matter. Abortion is the only issue that matters, and if you personally oppose it, regardless of your intellect or qualifications for the bench, you're an EvilNaziFascistTroglodyte who should be chained up and given sensitivity training until you've seen the light.

The coming battle over Alito's confirmation is really going to test my belief that, here in Canada, Members of Parliament should have a greater role in confirming Supreme Court judges.

Let's make a deal

As you've likely heard by now, Andrew Sullivan has signed an agreement to have his weblog hosted by Time magazine.

I say, good for him. If any major media outlet was prepared to host my site and pay me to blog - while letting me maintain editorial control, as Sully insists Time is allowing - I think I'd have to be insane not to take it. (It's not quite the same thing, but that's why I've signed up with Pajamas Media, which will officially be launched - and get its new name - tomorrow.)

Update: PJ Media is profiled on National Review Online today.

Conspirozoids with tenure

Another university professor, physicist Steven E. Jones of BYU, says the World Trade Center towers were brought down by "pre-positioned explosives":

The physics of 9/11 — including how fast and symmetrically one of the World Trade Center buildings fell — prove that official explanations of the collapses are wrong, says a Brigham Young University physics professor.

In fact, it's likely that there were "pre-positioned explosives" in all three buildings at ground zero, says Steven E. Jones.

In a paper posted online Tuesday and accepted for peer-reviewed publication next year, Jones adds his voice to those of previous skeptics, including the authors of the Web site www.wtc7.net, whose research Jones quotes. Jones' article can be found at www.physics.byu.edu/research/energy/htm7.html.

Jones, who conducts research in fusion and solar energy at BYU, is calling for an independent, international scientific investigation "guided not by politicized notions and constraints but rather by observations and calculations.

"It is quite plausible that explosives were pre-planted in all three buildings and set off after the two plane crashes — which were actually a diversion tactic," he writes. "Muslims are (probably) not to blame for bringing down the WTC buildings after all," Jones writes.

As for speculation about who might have planted the explosives, Jones said, "I don't usually go there. There's no point in doing that until we do the scientific investigation."

Uh-huh. Most 9/11 conspiracy theorists' "investigations" involve regurgitating each other's work, so it's not surprising that Jones's sources include the likes of Michel Chussodovsky's Global Outlook, David Ray Griffin's The New Pearl Harbor - and the unrepentantly antisemitic website "American Free Press". I'd love to know what kind of "peer review" process okayed this one.

(via Michelle Malkin, who is profiled in today's New York Sun)

Alternate reality-based community

Kossack logic: Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post is a McCarthyite. Therefore he should lose his job. And if you see any contradiction therein, you're a neocon chickenhawk Nazi fascist!!!

("Your editorial page has always "clapped louder" at the behest of the Bush Administration," bawls Armando. This must be some kind of elaborate hoax, then.)

She just didn't fit in

NBC will not be renewing The Apprentice: Martha Stewart after this season. At least they're letting it go out with a little dignity and keeping it on for sweeps, which is more than Arrested Development got.

There are several reasons why this version of The Apprentice failed. Ratings for the Donald Trump edition have been falling steadily since its first season, so it's not like the masses were clamoring for two versions of the show each week. (NBC oversaturated the market, just like ABC did when it put Who Wants to be a Millionaire on four times a week.) The show was initially given the difficult task of anchoring Wednesday night for the network - and was then swapped into a no-hope time slot against Lost. But perhaps most importantly, Martha Stewart simply isn't as bombastic, unrefined and entertaining as Trump, who comes across as a parody of a multi-millionaire businessman. Despite her reputation, she was just too darned nice to make the show work. (In retrospect, they should have made an edition in Hollywood, centred around the entertainment industry.)

That said, I still enjoyed the Martha Stewart Apprentice, and I'm disappointed it won't be around next year. If anything, the contestants on this version were more interesting than the ones competing for a Trump job - especially Jim, the most obnoxious reality-TV villain in years. It's a funny thing about these shows: more than anything else on earth, you want contestants like Jim eliminated - and at the same time, you want them to stick around, simply to keep things interesting. (Too bad the latest edition of Survivor, on which I have up a few weeks ago, doesn't have anyone like that.)

Worst Interview Ever

Look who's interviewing Mary Mapes now.

Quebec values

At the very same convention at which Paul Martin assailed the Conservatives for not understanding "Quebec values", the Quebec wing of the federal Liberal Party adopted a resolution encouraging Parliament to consider "all efforts" to reduce health-care waiting times - including, possibly, private health insurance. Gasp! (hat tip: Mark Collins)

Norm Spector asks why no one else reported this. Beats me, but you can be sure an identical resolution passed by the Tories would have been on the front page of the Globe.

Campaign for Christmas

The Liberals have rejected the opposition parties' demand that an election be called in January, so the government may be brought down - and an election called - some time next week. That's deeply upsetting to the Liberals, who will then be denied several months in which they can bribe Canadians into voting for them:

Liberal House Leader Tony Valeri said the government rejects a united opposition demand that an election be triggered in early January.

Valeri also read out a list of government initiatives -- like raises for soldiers and home heating assistance for the poor -- that would fall by the wayside if the government were to be defeated in the near term.

Paul Martin also made a "commitment" to democratic reforms as well, but who's keeping track? In a speech to the Quebec wing of the Liberal party, the PM previewed his upcoming Harper-is-a-tool-of-Bush campaign theme:

Prime Minister Paul Martin gave Canadians a taste of what they can expect to see in an election campaign yesterday, portraying Conservative leader Stephen Harper as a hawk afraid to stand up to the Americans and the Bloc Quebecois as a party intent on depriving Quebecers of the economic benefit of being part of Canada.
[...]
Mr. Martin mocked Mr. Harper's changes of position on how and when to bring down the government, suggesting only Conservatives could understand Mr. Harper's inconsistencies.

"They don't understand Quebec values," he said.

Update: Warren Kinsella hauls Paul Martin's quotes in support of the Iraq war from the memory hole. (Permalinks are for right-wing squares, evidently, so scroll down to his Nov. 11 entries.)

Your government at work

Carol Goar in the Toronto Star:

At first, Lynne Yelich thought it was a misprint.

There were no budgetary figures for the current fiscal year.

Rioter chic

A heavy police presence has reduced the rioting in France, but it's not over by a long shot:

France's national police chief said Sunday that the country's worst rioting since the 1960s seemed to be nearing an end, but violence persisted into the night, with at least two schools set on fire and dozens of cars torched.

A gas canister exploded inside a burning garbage can in the Alpine city of Grenoble, injuring two police officers, the national police said. Three officers were injured elsewhere.
[...]
The number of cars burned nightly has steadily decreased from 502 overnight into Saturday, to 374 overnight into Sunday, to 271 as Monday began. A week earlier, 1,400 cars were incinerated in a single night.

If the downward trend continues, "things could return to normal very quickly," National Police Chief Michel Gaudin said, noting that French youths burn about 100 cars on an average Saturday night.

A couple of stories suggest that the rioters have become the new heroes of the radical left and the anti-globalization movement. French film director Matthieu Kassovitz (Gothika) has issued a statement titled, "It's hard not to cheer on the rioters" (via Roger L. Simon), while a loony fringe group in Britain called "London Class War" is trying to organize demonstrations to back them up. "Anarchists" in Greece went on their own rampage against French institutions:

Groups of anarchists broke windows, threw paint and spray-painted slogans at French cultural institutes in Athens and northern Greece in support of rioters in France, Greek police said on Friday. About 50 people, wearing hoods and helmets and carrying red and black flags, threw stones, spark plugs and bottles filled with paint at the central Athens French Institute on Friday morning, breaking windows and damaging parked vehicles. Police said there were no injuries and the group dispersed quickly after the attack. Another group attacked the French institute in the northern city of Thessaloniki on Thursday evening, smashing windows while classrooms were filled with language students. They spray-painted “Rioters Are Right” on the front of the building.

Update: Bob Tarantino notes, "as the unrest winds down, the government seeks to extend the state of emergency by three months, or around eight times longer than the initial period."

I don't recall the PATRIOT Act going even remotely that far, not that you'd know it from comparing the reaction to each.

Christians under siege

In Sangla Hill, Pakistan, Muslim clerics have encouraged their followers to go on a rampage against Christians and their churches because of a rumour that one of them burnt the Koran:

The Christians of Sangla Hill in Pakistan were a community under siege last night after a Muslim mob rampaged through the town, burning churches and a Roman Catholic compound.
[...]
Local police and the Christian community agreed on how the violence began: a Christian man had spent several days gambling with Muslim men and had won a small fortune.

The same treatment was meted out to the church, convent, boarding house and medical centre. The feet were snapped off statues of Jesus, metal crucifixes were buckled and nuns' habits torched. [emphasis added]

When mobs of angry Catholics start rampaging through the streets, attacking Muslims and setting fire to mosques, let me know.

Update: meanwhile, in America's Partner Against Terror(TM)...

A court sentenced a teacher to 40 months in prison and 750 lashes for "mocking religion" after he discussed the Bible and praised Jews, a Saudi newspaper reported yesterday.

Al-Madina newspaper said secondary-school teacher Mohammad al-Harbi, who will be flogged in public, was taken to court by his colleagues and students.

He was charged with promoting a "dubious ideology, mocking religion, saying the Jews were right, discussing the Gospel and preventing students from leaving class to wash for prayer," the newspaper said.

Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam, strictly upholds the austere Wahhabi school of Islam and bases its constitution on the Koran and the sayings of the prophet Muhammad. Public practice of any other religion is banned.

He's ba-ack...

Steven Den Beste, who got many a blogger blogging in the first place, is contributing to RedState.org.

(via Shire Network News)

Cpl. Doug Carey U.S.M.C. - Hero

Thank you Cpl. Doug Carey for your service. (And thank you Mr. McRae for for your column.)

P.S. - You Canucks are amazing.

It's funny 'cause it's true (It's also depressing 'cause it's true)

Lorrie Goldstein stares into the abyss. The abyss, in this case, being the mind of the Ontario Liberal voter.

(hat tip: Mark Collins)

Democracy in D.C.

Residents of Washington, D.C. believe it's unfair that they pay federal taxes but don't elect Senators or full members of the House of Representation. They say it amounts to taxation without representation, and they have a point. But they aren't helping their cause by electing people like this:

The big antipollution machine that almost got former Mayor Marion Barry involved in a fight with a prominent D.C. minister has been moved to a less-populated area of the city.

Barry is supporting the machine's inventor, who says it can cheaply turn waste products into clean water and efficient gas for electricity.

Everyone's heard of Marion "The bitch set me up!" Barry, who won re-election to city council in 2004 with 96 percent of the vote. But Rev. Wilson, who made a credible run for mayor in 2002, is a frothing, hatemongering moonbat in his own right. (You have got to hear the excerpts from Wilson's "lesbianism is taking over our communities!!!" sermon in episode 36 of the retroCRUSH podcast.)

As for that energy machine, I'll be the first to congratulate Barry if it really works, but I'm getting a kind of Joseph Newman vibe from it.

Dollars for Days

A recent decision of the Supreme Court of Canada, Contino v. Leonelli-Contino, states that a parent paying child support may not necessarily have his payment obligations reduced even though he is spending more time with the child:

The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that a divorced father cannot automatically expect to have support payments to his ex-wife reduced just because he spends more time with their child.
[...]
At issue is a section in the Federal Child Support Guidelines that sets out how child-support payments are to be calculated when a parent has custody of a child more than 40 per cent of the time.

"The Supreme Court has said quite clearly that you should not operate on the basis of a standard fixed formula."

My first instinct was to think it's fundamentally unfair for a father's support payments (and in cases like this, it's almost always the father paying support to the mother) to not be reduced even though the child may be with him half the time. The right-wing cynic in me even wonders whether the court would have ruled this way had the gender roles been different. That said, the decision does not mean a father's support won't be reduced under these circumstances, merely that it isn't guaranteed. And as the mother's lawyer notes, the decision may make custodial parents less reluctant to allow increased access to the other:

Deidre Smith, the lawyer for Ms. Leonelli-Contino, said the decision recognizes that spending more time with a child doesn't necessarily translate into increased expenses.

"They won't have that sword hanging over either of their necks, about what kind of impact it's going to have on family finances," Ms. Smith said. Separating child-rearing issues from financial issues "is a big win for kids in Canada," she said.

The worst thing about this ruling is that it's going to make the proper determination of child support even more complicated. The whole point of the child support guidelines was to simplify the process, and until now most "shared custody" cases have been settled using a simple formula: see what the mother would pay the father under the guidelines, and then what the father would pay the mother, and the smaller amount would offset the larger amount. With the Contino ruling, it's almost like we're back where we were before the guidelines were introduced.

The Deignan Affair

Cathy Young has a comprehensive post the latest blogosphere spat (and classic example of "liberal" McCarthyism).

At the root of this mess is whether Deignan's comments at "Bitch, Ph.D." amounted to offensive trolling. Aside from the fact that he disagreed with the leftist position on abortion, was there really anything "offensive" about what he wrote? To ask the question is to answer it.

The Baron is back

After a two-month hiatus (partly because of Hurricane Katrina, and partly because of some personal developments he explains on his site), my friend Tom Forsyth (aka "the Green Baron") has resumed blogging. He's also re-enlisted in the U.S. Army, and expects to serve in (and blog from) Iraq within the next year. Wish him luck.

I presume this wasn't covered on LCI

The French riots have diminished since emergency police powers and curfews were imposed by the government - but they haven't ended by a long shot, and this evening rioters took to the centre of once of France's largest cities:

Police in the French city of Lyon have fired tear gas to break up groups of youths who hurled stones and bins hours before a curfew was due to begin.

Lyon has imposed a curfew for the first time in two weeks of nationwide unrest.

Vous can't handle the truth!

In stark contrast to the American news channels, which reported every hysterical rumour about Hurricane Katrina on the flimsiest of grounds, the head of a prominent French all-news network admits to playing down news of the riots. Also in contrast to American journalists, he freely admits his channel did so for blatantly political reasons:

One of France's leading TV news executives has admitted censoring his coverage of the riots in the country for fear of encouraging support for far-right politicians.

French broadcasters have faced criticism for their lack of coverage of the country's worst civil unrest in decades. Public television station France 3 has stopped broadcasting the numbers of torched cars while other TV stations are considering following suit.

It must be noted that the "rightwing politicians" to which he refers aren't conservatives as we know them in Canada or the United States, but neo-fascists like Jean-Marie Le Pen. (No word as to whether LCI censors its coverage to avoid bolstering the extreme left-wing parties.) But it's interesting, to say the least, to see the media in supposedly enlightened France openly admitting - bragging, even - to slanting its news coverage in ways that just happen to benefit the government. Kind of puts the Fox News Channel in perspective, doesn't it?

(via Captain's Quarters)

Poll Watch

The Toronto Star has the Liberals ahead of the Conservatives, 33-28, with a surging NDP:

With an election looming ever closer, public support for Paul Martin's Liberals remains mired in minority government territory, according to a new Toronto Star poll.

The Conservatives have 30 per cent support, compared to 31.5 in the election, and the NDP are at 23 per cent, up from 18 per cent in 2004.

A Decima Research survey says the Liberals' lead - both nationally and in Ontario - is even tighter, but that voters remain nervous about electing a Conservative government. Once again, we see that the only thing the Liberals really have going for them is fear, and that will almost certainly be reflected in their election camapign:

Conservative Leader Stephen Harper must win over young urban voters - especially women - or risk a replay of the Liberals' 2004 minority win, a new poll suggests.

In vote-laden Ontario, where successive federal elections have been won or lost, the Liberal lead jumps to 40 per cent compared to 32 per cent for the Tories.

As for Quebec, both surveys put the Bloc way ahead of the Liberals (53-25 in the TorStar poll, 55-26 according to Decima). Jean Chretien's sponsorship program, meant to drive a stake through the heart of the separatist movement, ultimately made the Bloc Quebecois more popular than ever.

Pat Robertson's Gold

In the comments section to this post, a reader brought up the subject of Robertson "being an investor in some diamond scheme in one of Africa's most brutal countries". It's actually a gold-mining operation in Liberia, and Washington Post columnist Colbert I. King wrote two columns about it just after 9/11. (Liberia just elected a new President - but Robertson's deal was with former dictator Charles Taylor, a loathsome scumbag even by African-dictator standards.)

Flag of surrender = "Flag of Peace"

A "peace" group in Maine shows its support for the troops again:

Protesters led by a veterans post tried to remove a flag display placed by peace activists at a veterans cemetery, and five were charged with criminal trespass.

The display of 2,000 white flags, meant to remember U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq, was set up at Veterans Memorial Park cemetery Oct. 30 under a permit issued to Waterville Area Bridges for Peace and Justice.
[...]
Wayne Elkins, the VFW commander who led the protesters and was among those detained, said he had no problem with the peace group, as long as it stays out of the cemetery.

"They desecrated our veterans' grounds. If they want to protest, let them protest. We don't mind. But to desecrate hallowed ground is wrong," he said.

Hey, guys, if you don't want people "questioning your patriotism", stop doing shit like this. (via Charles Johnson, who rightly notes, "any time a group uses the words “Peace and Justice” in their name, you can be sure that they have absolutely nothing to do with either.")

Bring me my black armband

The best show on television has been cancelled:

There was no official announcement -- there rarely is when the networks wield the ax -- but after two and half wonderfully funny seasons, Fox's Emmy-winning ``Arrested Development'' is dead.

The episodes that have already been filmed will be burned off in December and, as of January, ``Arrested'' will vanish, the victim of low (really low) viewership.

I don't blame Fox, which kept the show on for 2 1/2 seasons, for the fact that no one was watching. I blame you, the viewer. (It's all over for the underrated Kitchen Confidential, too.)

Update: I finally got around to watching the latest My Name is Earl today, and the fact that it's doing so well is the only thing that softens the blow from the dreadful news about Arrested Development. How can I not love a show that would make an entire episode based on the first movie I ever saw (seriously!), right down to the closing credits? (Yes, I even have "East Bound and Down" on my MP3 player.)

Dear God: why are you letting this moron speak for you?

Pat Robertson (sigh) is at it again:

Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson warned residents of a rural Pennsylvania town Thursday that disaster may strike there because they "voted God out of your city" by ousting school board members who favored teaching intelligent design.

All eight Dover, Pa., school board members up for re-election were defeated Tuesday after trying to introduce "intelligent design" - the belief that the universe is so complex that it must have been created by a higher power - as an alternative to the theory of evolution.

"I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: If there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God. You just rejected him from your city," Robertson said on the Christian Broadcasting Network's "700 Club."

Robertson is every bit as disgusting as the likes of Ted Rall or Mark Morford. Actually, he's probably worse - at least Rall and Morford aren't giving the President advice on Supreme Court nominations.

Seriously, Lord, I don't want you to kill him. Stupidity and hypocrisy, even in Your name, shouldn't be a capital offence. But can't you at least unleash a plague of frogs at CBN headquarters or something?

Week 10

10-4 last week - my best one yet - for a season record of 68-62.

Arizona at Detroit -yes, this is the third week in a row I've picked the Cardinals. Maybe I like the color of their uniforms, maybe I still have too much misplaced faith in Kurt Warner, or maybe it's the crystal meth. But look who they're playing this week!
Baltimore at Jacksonville
Houston at Indianapolis - Indy has to lose some time, and I think it will be against a mediocre team. But the Texans aren't good enough to be called "mediocre".
Kansas City at Buffalo
Minnesota at NY Giants - welcome back to the real world, Vikings.
New England at Miami - upset special #1.
San Francisco at Chicago - potential trap game.
Denver at Oakland - upset special #2. Everyone is just waiting for Jake Plummer to crash back to earth.
NY Jets at Carolina
Green Bay at Atlanta
St. Louis at Seattle
Washington at Tampa Bay - the Bucs are in freefall.
Cleveland at Pittsburgh - even with Batch or Maddox, the Steelers shouldn't have any trouble with the Browns.
Dallas at Philadelphia

Nice one, Zarqawi

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's Iraqi Al-Qaida group has claimed responsibility for the Amman hotel bombings, and his fellow Jordanians don't like it one bit:

In the dusty Jordanian hometown of the man whose al Qaeda wing in Iraq says it carried out triple bombings of Amman hotels, neighbours and relatives had one message for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi: repent.

Most of the casualties were Jordanian civilians.

Some people, of course, will use such stories as "proof" that the omnipotent Americans and Israelis must have really masterminded the bombings. After all, "who benefits?" (These guys believe suicide bombings are a justifiable inevitable reaction to American and Israeli policy, but that they're all carried out by the CIA and the Mossad. Only a brainwashed chickenhawk neocon, or a bloodsucking Jew, would see any contradiction.)

Every year, their numbers get smaller

Almost all of Canada's First World War veterans have gone to their eternal reward, and the ranks of our WW2 and Korean War veterans are dwindling, too:

The ranks of Canada's war veterans, once more than a million strong, are dwindling fast but remembrance of their deeds seems as strong as ever.

About 1.75 million Canadians served in those three wars.

Remember them. Honour them. Thank them.

Subtitled: The Fall of Trudeaupia Begins

OK people... Someone (please) buy Damian this book for Christmas: Rescuing Canada's Right

Bonus: The Intro is by Mark Steyn. (I'll get a copy for my brother in T.O.)

Secretary of Partying Down

I don't have much to say about the latest cabinet shuffle here in Newfoundland, but Craig Welsh convincingly argues that the Tourism portfolio has to be just about the sweetest gig around. On the other hand, in this province, woe is the poor sucker appointed Minister of Fisheries:

I always thought that the Fishery portfolio was about the biggest no-win one there was in government. People always hate you. No matter what you do, you're wrong. You're a pawn of the manufacturers. You're ignoring the fiscal realities of the modern fishery. You're trying to destroy rural Newfoundland. And so on and so forth.

Now he's minister in charge of job creation and the vastly overworked social services department. Bummer, man.

Tom Hedderson is the lucky fellow who gets his picture in next year's Travel Guide, while Tom Rideout - Premier of Newfoundland for about 5 minutes in 1989 - gets the job from Hell.

Blogger published

Edu-blogger Joanne Jacobs has a new book out - and it's already up to #475 on Amazon.com.

Richard Neville is going to be pissed

A shocking discovery at MIT:

Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a sample group of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government's invasive abilities. We theorize that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason. [emphasis added]

Maybe conspiracy theorists should start wearing these instead.

Screw you, veterans

It happens every year around this time: while the overwhelming majority of Canadians are proud to honor the veterans who bravely fought and died for their great country, a few leftists, drunk on their own self-righteousness, proudly proclaim their refusal to "glorify war" by wearing a poppy. Here's the latest example, from a teacher - it's always a teacher, isn't it? - who goes so far as to equate Canada and the allies with the Nazis.

Am I going too far in saying this guy says we're no better than Nazi Germany? Judge for yourself:

I imagine that if the Nazis had taken over the world, we would be encouraged to celebrate that conquest on some day of observation, perhaps "honouring" the soldiers of the Fatherland and the sacrifices that they made as the Third Reich spread its "benevolent influence" over the world, heralding an age of prosperity and racial purity. On the other hand, they might have developed a pithy slogan to represent their foul cause, perhaps one like "freedom". Either way, I wouldn't wear a swastika on my lapel on that day, just like I don't wear a poppy on my lapel on Remembrance Day.
[...]
WWII was a complex conflict based in the context of the resolution of WWI. Although that context gave fertile soil to the most notorious example of evil known to history - Hitler and the Nazis - the resulting conflict was more a continuation of imperialist rivalries and nationalistic competition than it was a legitimate battle between good and evil, as it has been characterized in the Remembrance Day sloganeering that has come to dominate November 11th.

Ask a Japanese Canadian who spent time in a WWII internment camp and whose family was stripped of its property whether his or her "freedom" was safeguarded by the efforts of Canada's soldiers. Ask one of Canada's indigenous people who, at the end of WWII, wasn't allowed to vote in elections as a result of his or her "Indian status" whether he or she felt free at the conclusion of WWII. The fact that we recognize the efforts of our soldiers in the Korean War - a border skirmish in the ideological Cold War - conclusively demonstrates that we are not just recognizing the efforts of soldiers to protect freedom and democracy. Remembrance Day uses the veneer of virtues like "freedom" and "democracy" to glorify military solutions to the world's problems.

So, how should we have dealt with the Nazis? Why, if we'd only gone to the gas chambers willingly, they would have been so overcome with guilt that they would have thrown down their cattle prods and begged our forgiveness, or something:

Of course, the question must be addressed, "Faced with the Nazi menace, what were we to do?" Mahatma Gandhi, who also faced oppressive imperial forces during his lifetime, said, "Non-violence is a weapon of the strong." When faced with oppression and injustice, sometimes it can be easier to lash out in violent reaction - one that will further propagate the conflict, perhaps sowing seeds of future conflicts - than to react in a constructive, non-violent way that will actually resolve the conflict, giving rise to things such as true freedom and democracy. What would Gandhi have done in Poland or Germany if he were faced with the advance of the Third Reich and witness to the holocaust?

Perhaps, in protest, he would have joined a line up of Jewish people waiting to board a train to Auschwitz. Would you have the courage to make that sacrifice? Would I?

Yeah, that would've learned 'em. (Neo-neocon deals with Gandhi, pacifism and the Holocaust here.) That's pacifism in a nutshell: no one is completely evil (except George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon, of course, but that's different), we're no better than "they" are, and it's better to surrender and die than to assume something might be worth fighting for.

If all of us adopted this view, maybe the world would be a better place. The key phrase is "all of us". When no one else is willing to fight, the aggressor has free reign over the rest.

The poppy I had on my winter coat fell out last night. After reading this garbage, I'll definitely be picking up another one this afternoon.

(via Darren Barefoot)

The UN's Darkest Hour

On this date in 1975, the United Nations General Assembly - at the behest of the Soviet Union, the Arab states and noted humanitarian Idi Amin - passed the most shameful resolution in its long history, equating Israel's very existence with racism.

The UN revoked the resolution in 1991, but how much has really changed? Put it this way: UNESCO decided that the person most deserving of its 2005 International Music Prize, "for his contributions to understanding between cultures and the advancement of peace", was rabidly antisemitic Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis. (Laurence Simon's response, on the latest Shire Network News podcast, is essential listening.)

In the end, the truth wins

A superb Tech Central Station article by Douglas Kern describes the way the internet, which can be used to spread nonsense and propaganda, ultimately shut down the alien-abduction hysteria of the 1990s:

If you're looking for one of those famous, big-eyed alien abductors, try looking on the sides of milk cartons. The UFO cultural moment in America is long since over, having gone out with the Clintons and grunge rock in the 90s. Ironically, the force that killed the UFO fad is the same force that catapulted it to super-stardom: the Internet. And therein hangs a tale about how the Internet can conceal and reveal the truth.
[...]
Yet in recent years, interest in the UFO phenomenon has withered. Oh, the websites are still up, the odd UFO picture is still taken, and the usual hardcore UFO advocates make the same tired arguments about the same tired cases, but the thrill is gone. What happened? Why did the saucers crash?

The Internet taught the public many tricks of the UFO trade. For years, hucksters and mental cases played upon the credulity of UFO investigators. Bad science, shabby investigation, and dubious tales from unlikely witnesses characterized far too many UFO cases. But the rise of the Internet taught the world to be more skeptical of unverified information -- and careful skepticism is the bane of the UFO phenomenon. It took UFO experts over a decade to determine that the "Majestic-12" documents of the eighties were a hoax, rather than actual government documents proving the reality of UFOs. Contrast that decade to the mere days in which the blogosphere disproved the Mary Mapes Memogate documents. Similarly, in the nineties, UFO enthusiasts were stunned when they learned that a leading investigator of the Roswell incident had fabricated much of his research, as well as his credentials. Today, a Google search and a few e-mails would expose such shenanigans in minutes.

Right now, an Italian documentary accusing the Americans of using chemical weapons in Fallujah is furiously making the rounds on the internet - but bloggers like Scott Burgess and Michael Moynihan are simultaneously debunking it.

I love the Aussies

Australian Deputy PM Peter Costello:

If you are somebody who wants to live in an Islamic state governed by sharia law you are not going to be happy in Australia, because Australia is not an Islamic state, will never be an Islamic state and will never be governed by sharia law.

There are Islamic states around the world that practise sharia law and if that’s your object you may well be much more at home in such a country than trying to turn Australia into one of those countries, because it’s not going to happen.

Terror in Jordan

Three hotels in Amman, frequented by Israeli and Western tourists, have been struck by suicide bombers:

The three targeted hotels were the Radisson SAS, the Grand Hyatt, and the Days Inn. The three hotels are popular with Western and Israeli tourists.

The Radisson is known to be popular with Israeli tourists, but there was no confirmation of the nationality of any of the dead or wounded. Witnesses said many Western tourists were staying there.

Update: a Fox News correspondent just said the death toll is now 53.

Sweet, sweet schaedenfreude

You knew it was only a matter of time before some enterprising American blogger posted something like this.

Mary keeps digging

Like an old Japanese soldier hiding in the jungle who refuses to believe World War II is over and that his side lost, Mary Mapes continues to defend her Bush-National Guard story and the bogus documents on which she relied:

Linda Mason, a CBS News senior vice president, said Mapes was fired because "her basic reporting was faulty. She relied on documents that could not be authenticated -- you could never authenticate a Xeroxed copy. She led others who trusted her down the wrong road." Viacom acted because its executives were "stunned at the report" and concerned about restoring CBS News's reputation, she said.

Three of CBS's own document experts say they had warned CBS they could not authenticate the memos. Mapes's source for the documents, former National Guardsman Bill Burkett, later admitted lying about who had given him the memos said to have been written by Bush's long-dead Guard commander. "Document analysis is a real subjective profession," said Mapes, who still believes the memos are real. "You can find one to say yea or nay on anything."
[...]
Perhaps her greatest fury is reserved for the "vicious" bloggers who pounced on the "60 Minutes II" report within hours -- and who she believes provided the map that major news organizations, including The Washington Post, essentially followed.

"I was attacked, Dan was attacked, CBS was attacked 24 hours a day by people who hid behind screen names," Mapes said. "I may be a flawed journalist, but I put my name on things." Some of the key bloggers, however, posted criticism under their own names.

I knew "Hinderaker" couldn't possibly be a real name.

Conspiracy Theories + Health Scares - Medical Degree = $$$$$$$

I haven't heard much from "psychic" John Edwards lately, but Kevin Trudeau has replaced him as America's charlatan of choice:

Over the years, Trudeau, an ex-con who never went to college or medical school, has been remarkably successful doing infomercials for everything from how to achieve a photographic memory to how to cure your addictions to how to beat cancer by ingesting a particular type of calcium that, as fate would have it, he also happened to sell.

He says sunscreen doesn't prevent skin cancer. Instead (wait for it), sunscreen causes skin cancer.
[...]
Trudeau's publishing company -- which he happens to have founded -- says he's sold 4 million copies of "Natural Cures," many of them through phone orders. While those numbers can't be verified, his sales through traditional outlets have been astonishing -- so far he's spent 16 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

If that fails, the book advises you to try Scientology.

It's easy to laugh, until you realize there are actually gullible people out there throwing out their prescription drugs because the nice man on the infomercials told them to. It's strange: we're the healthiest, longest-lived people in history, thanks largely to the "medical establishment" and the pharmaceutical industry ("they", in Trudeau-speak), but there are still millions of paranoid idiots out there who think it's all a big conspiracy to keep us sick.

(Via Mick Hartley, who also notes some funny business regarding the Amazon.com reviews around the time this article was published.)

Any day now

We're inching closer and closer to a federal election:

Jack Layton sent the Conservatives the clarion signal they have been demanding, stating unequivocally Tuesday that he is committed to helping them bring down the government at the next available opportunity.

Not even Harper went that far. The Tory leader said he has not decided whether to support the Liberals in the vote on $13.5 billion in government spending.

State of Emergency

The rioting in France seems to be decreasing, now that the French government has authorized curfews and increased police powers:

France's worst outbreak of urban violence since 1968 ebbed last night after President Jacques Chirac'c government authorized curfews and increased the police presence in ransacked neighborhoods.

The police added 1,000 officers from the previous night, bringing the total to 11,500, Gaudin said. He cited sporadic incidents, including looting in the northern town of Arras and a bus burning in Bordeaux.
[...]
The measures announced yesterday allow local officials to determine whether to impose curfews and permits police to conduct searches for weapons without a warrant.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin proposed in parliament a package of measures to aid residents of the afflicted ghettoes. He plans to increase by 100 million euros ($118 million) subsidies to local associations, add 5,000 teaching assistant posts, create 15 zones with tax breaks to encourage job creation, and offer 20,000 work contracts with local governments. He also said he will set up an anti-discrimination agency.

Patrick Belton, from OxBlog, is blogging directly from Paris.

Guest Post: Paris and Toronto

Do you know what the riots in Paris remind me of? Toronto's current shooting spree.

In both cases, the actors are the children of immigrants from a poor country who have not been successfully oriented toward mainstream occupations and have turned to crime and violence instead.

The problem in Toronto has, at times, been blamed on a high school drop out rate among the children of Jamaican parents. But the Toronto Star has also published reports that the Portuguese community has an equally high drop out rate and we don't see the same level of criminal activity there.

So, it's blamed on racism. But I just read an article by Theordore Dalrymple which suggests that such a simple conclusion doesn't always explain everything.

He claims that, in England, the children of Pakistani immigrants are much less successful than the children of Indian immigrants. Visually, these people are identical so racism can't be the problem. It has to be cultural. And, if true, that might be a factor in Toronto as well.

In the 1990s The Star ran an article claiming that gun and posse culture among young Torontonians had been imported directly from Jamaica. But you don't hear much about that today.

Instead, Royson James of The Toronto Star blames our provincial and municipal governments for cutting back on social programs. He also blames non-criminal Torontonians for their lack of concern. He doesn't blame the bad guys themselves. They are the victims of a bad society.

It's one thing to identify violent crime as a social problem that the government must help solve. But it's quite another to say it was caused by the government and everyone else but the actual shooters.

That's a bad attitude. It tells innocent people that they're bad and violent young men that they have no control of their lives. They are simply puppets controlled by government and society at large.

Also, James' key target is former Ontario premier, Mike Harris. But this problem existed well before Mike Harris came to power. No one wanted to talk about it very much because the perpretrators were members of a minority group and many people didn't want to tie a vulnerable community to the crimes of a few of its members.

Now that the the victims are primarily members of a minority community, everyone is willing to admit there's a problem. But, a guy like James still only wants to acknowledge the victim problem, refusing to focus any blame on the people who hurt them.

I'm sure James isn't a bad guy but in trying to be fair, he's doing a disservice to Toronto's Jamaican community by blaming everyone but the people who are actually terrorizing it and giving it a bad name.

Now he's sorry

T.O. has issued an apology to the Philadelphia Eagles. It might have saved him on Saturday or even Sunday, but it's too late now.

Suffering Eagles fan Jonathan Last says the Eagles have done the right thing, and that Owens is "radioactive" these days. He really needs a year in the CFL or NFL Europe - and a minor-league salary - to sufficiently humble him. But does anyone really believe a reciever this talented won't be playing somewhere else in the NFL next year? (Washington and Green Bay are the names getting bounced around the most. Personally, I can see him ending up with whichever team drafts Matt Leinart - unless it's the 49ers, obviously.)

And here's the million-dollar question: if the Bears signed Owens, would I welcome the move? If they were having as bad a season as I had expected, I'd be desperate enough to want him, even though they don't have the QB they'd need to get the most out of him. (Orton is getting better, but he has a long way to go.) But the Bears are 5-3 and are now unanimously expected to win their weak division, so why risk it by adding the NFL's most difficult player to the locker room?

In defence of the Legion

The Royal Canadian Legion is taking a lot of heat from Canadian bloggers (most notably Colby Cosh) for demanding that Pierre Bourque remove the poppy from his website. But Bob Tarantino says that Canadian IP law effectively compels the Legion to enforce its copyright trademark:

Trade-mark law is confusing and sometimes almost wilfully stupid. But it is what it is, and the Legion (and any other trade-mark owner) is forced to work with what they've got. Here's how this works: broadly speaking, a trade-mark identifies the source of a product or service. When you see a Coca-Cola logo on a bottle, you can be sure that, somewhere along the line, the Coca-Cola company had a hand in either making or approving the making of the contents of that bottle - you can be sure, in other words, that you're getting what you pay for. Same with any of a million other marks: Revlon, Disney, Bill's Flower Shop, whatever.

The government gives trade-mark owners the exclusive right to use their marks - meaning that the government will back up that monopoly of use with the full powers of the state to compel compliance. But in return for that, owners need to "police" the use of their marks - they cannot (and I repeat: cannot) allow unauthorized use of their marks or else they face the very real possibility of losing the exclusive rights to the mark entirely.
[...]
Imagine Company X is able to introduce evidence into court demonstrating that the image of the poppy is being used all over the place: on the internet, by other companies, by whomever. And the Legion is not only not authorizing such uses, but they're doing nothing to stop it. No threatening letters, no lawsuits, nothing. Suddenly, the judge looks over the rim of his or her glassed, raises his or her eyebrows at the Legion and tells them to bugger off. They're aren't policing their mark, and so the mark isn't an indicator of source anymore: when people see the mark all over the place (like, say, on websites), they can't be sure that it's the Legion standing behind the mark (whether this is factually correct, i.e., whether people actually think that the Legion is involved or not, is well-nigh irrelevant). The Legion loses, and Company X (and anyone else for that matter) can now use the poppy pretty much however they see fit.

Regardless of whether the Legion is right or wrong, it's not going to stop me from wearing a poppy or donating money. It's simply too strong a symbol, and too good a cause, to boycott in protest.

It's fun to smash things

Jane Galt offers yet another reason why rioting and destruction have spread through the squalid, soul-destroying public-housing estates of France:

Why are French muslims rioting?

Let me suggest another possibility: Muslim youth are rioting in France because breaking windows and setting cars on fire is fun.

Groups offer another benefit: it makes it less likely you'll be arrested. It's like being in a herd of zebra; if there's only one zebra on the veldt, the stripes make it easy picking. But when there's three hundred of them, it's hard to single one out to take it down. Similarly, one guy attacking cars with a sledgehammer is easy pickings. Three hundred of them reduce the probability that any one rioter will get caught.

Indeed, contrary to the oft-stated principle that the rioters are driven by "despair", many of them seem to be having the time of their lives.

Why France? Why now?

As in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, bloggers and pundits are using the French riots - "Paris riots" no longer accurately describes a phenomenon that has spread throughout the country - as confirmation of their pre-existing political beliefs. (Here's the definitive example of this phenomenon.) Conservatives say Islamic militancy is the main problem, even though most of the rioters appear to pledge allegiance more to 50 Cent than to Osama bin Laden (and even though many of them aren't even Muslim). Leftists, meanwhile, stop just short of saying the rioters are advocates for social justice and a "fairer" society - and what better way to show it than to set schools and hospitals on fire?

There are literally dozens of factors which caused this outburst of violence. (Islamofascism and unemployment undoubtedly account for some of it, but certainly not all.) But nearly everyone acknowledges that the country's failure to integrate its growing immigrant underclass - packing them into squalid public-housing estates, with few employment opportunities and where gangs and drug dealers are allowed to ply their trade without interference from the police - is probably the biggest one of all. Today's Washington Post has a good analysis of the situation, though it implicitly places all the blame on "mainstream" French society instead of those who chose - yes, chose - to rampage through the streets:

While many French leaders depict the rioters as simple criminals, political and social analysts and many French citizens see the fires that are burning across the country as reflecting a growing identity crisis in a nation where social policies have not kept up with rapidly changing profiles in religion, race and ethnicity.

At present, the country has an estimated 6 million Muslims, most of African descent. The fear of losing France's traditional white European identity fueled French voters' rejection of the proposed European Union constitution last summer and has heightened French opposition to admitting Muslim Turkey into the E.U.
[...]
Some political analysts said government officials didn't focus on the severity of the violence in its first days because many were on vacation or at their country houses celebrating the All Saints' Day holiday. As they returned to their Paris offices the following Monday, the rioting was gaining momentum across the suburbs.

Still, President Jacques Chirac did not speak out publicly until Monday evening, the 12th night of violence. He made a three-minute appearance and vowed tough action against the perpetrators.

The really depressing thing is that the situation in Great Britain and the Netherlands, where governments place a greater emphasis on "multiculturalism" instead of color-blind integration, is little better, notes Sandro Contenta in the Toronto Star:

The problem largely revolves around Europe's inability to integrate up to 15 million Muslims of immigrant background.

The children of these immigrants were born in Europe, but they often live on the margins of society, facing discrimination, and struggling with unemployment and dropout rates much higher than national averages.

What on earth is to be done about this? In the short term, the French have little choice but to take tougher law-and-order measures until the situation has calmed down. But in the long term, your guess is as good as mine.

No comment

Gwynne Dyer: "The real problem with all this ranting about the failures of multiculturalism is that the Paris riots are actually a splendid demonstration of the successful integration of immigrants into French culture (which has, after all, a long tradition of insurrection and revolution)."

(hat tip: Tim Blair)

Torch Passed

Colts 40, Patriots 21.

Philadelphia's season from Hell

T.O. is out for the rest of the year:

Terrell Owens won't return to the Philadelphia Eagles this season, coach Andy Reid said.

Owens was suspended over the weekend following a tumultuous week in which he criticized the club, fought with a former teammate and took another verbal shot at quarterback Donovan McNabb.
[...]
Owens was suspended Nov. 5, two days after he said the Eagles showed "a lack of class" for not publicly recognizing his 100th career touchdown catch in a game Oct. 23. In the same interview with ESPN.com on Nov. 3, Owens said the Eagles would be better off with Green Bay's Brett Favre at quarterback.

McNabb, who feuded with Owens throughout the summer and has been a constant target of his criticism, finally took a stand in the matter, saying the Eagles might be "better off" without Owens.

Maybe they would. (Yes, the Eagles couldn't make it to the Super Bowl until they signed Owens, but he was injured for most of the playoffs last year, including the NFC championship game.) But there's another NFC team which got rid of their famously uncoachable, egomaniacal wide reciever this past summer. How's that working out for them?

A Canadian Hero

Edmonton-based Brig.-Gen. David Fraser will take command of coalition forces in southern Afghanistan early next year:

Senior Canadian officers already in Afghanistan preparing for Brig.-Gen. Fraser's arrival and the new multinational brigade emphasized that what lay ahead is not at all traditional peacekeeping as it is understood by most of their countrymen.

"I would characterize the force that we are putting in place as robust and capable of full spectrum operations. When we identify the enemy, we will work with the Afghan army to take them out. Our goal will be to kill or capture those elements."

At least some Canadians get it. Good luck, guys.

"When it comes to rioting, there's no 35-hour week in France"

Not surprisingly, Theodore Dalrymple has written one of the best essays about the French riots, in today's Wall Street Journal:

No one should gloat over riots in other countries, since such Schadenfreude is usually soon punished by riots nearer home. After what happened recently in New Orleans or in Birmingham, who would dare to assert that what is happening in the suburbs of Paris could never happen chez les Anglo-Saxons? But at the very least, the events in the suburbs of Paris should puncture French complacency that they have developed a model of society vastly superior and more humane to that of supposedly savage economic liberalism.

The only fly in the ointment (apart from the fact that the rest of the economies of the world won't leave the French economy in peace) is that the portion of the population whom the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, so tactlessly, but in the secret opinion of most Frenchmen so accurately, referred to as the "racaille" -- scum -- is not very happy with the settlement as it stands. It wants to be left alone to commit crimes uninterrupted by the police, as is its inalienable right.

As Dalrymple predicted in his article, the rioting may have spread to Germany and Belgium.

Harroon Siddiqui Blames French Riots on Racism

Haroon Siddiqui writes in The Toronto Star:

...one suspects that France, with its anti-immigrant pathology, will continue to muddle along....

You can't realistically expect the destitute with nothing productive to do to stay off crime while you let businesses, police forces, public institutions and citizens break the laws against discrimination.

The fine French statutes on equality carry the musty smell of the grand but unimplemented constitution of the dear departed Soviet Union.

But the French have been insulated in their racist cocoon and, typically, blaming the victims.

...Few see the incongruity of keeping non-whites on the fringes of society and, then, accusing them of not belonging to it.

...France is sitting on a time bomb, which can only be defused by extending the full benefits and responsibilities of equal citizenship to all...

I don't understand? Are these rioters, the children of guest-workers, not French citizens with full rights, already? Are they allowed to go to school and seek employment?

Or is the problem caused by discrimination against qualified people, plain and simple. Siddiqui implies that this is the problem:

Unemployment among non-whites is nearly 15 per cent, compared to the national rate of 9 per cent. It is 30 per cent in the crowded and crumbling social housing projects, the site of the rioting and also last summer's fires that killed 24 people.

Whereas the national jobless rate for university graduates is 5 per cent, it is 26.5 per cent for "North Africans."

Rosie Di Manno Hates Old Broads

I've been a bit surprised by The Toronto Star's reaction to Camiller who is now visiting Washington with her husband, Prince Charles.

I can understand any decent person being angry that this guy married a young girl to use her callously as cover for his on-going relationship with a married woman.

But, if that's the problem, why go around complaining that Camilla looks like Keith Richards?

Here's Rosie Di Manno:

The Charles & Camilla Oldies Road Show last night attended a performance of Beach Blanket Babylon in San Francisco, which at least sounds age-appropriate for two fossils who passed through teen-hood in the '60s.

Camilla, wearing a diadem on loan from her mother-in-law... looked like a drag queen in rhinestone... Royal stature does not sit easily on this stiffly hairsprayed head.

Were she still alive, Diana would now be 44 and no doubt a glamorous, fashion-plate sophisticate....

...Mrs. Windsor led with a flattering dress that revealed a prominent décolletage. In this one department... lanky Diana could never compete. Although she did look mighty stacked at her debut as affianced princess-to-be — back in those pre-bulimic days when she was still a ripe 19-year-old....

Two points: Rosie must be around 50, herself and, hey, could a guy get away with writing this?

Is this 1491?

The situation in France appears to be civil war, albeit unilateral. It's just a question as to whether the French will engage the enemy.

Rick McGinnis reminded us yesterday of "the venerable tradition of terrorist groups and their sympathizers making alliances with or morphing into organized criminals. It's as old as modern cities, and Northern Ireland provides a textbook example of the phenomenon."

Mark Steyn has a new contribution in the Chicago Sun-Times on the current war in Europe. Mark concludes his chilling view with this:

"In the current issue of City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple concludes a piece on British suicide bombers with this grim summation of the new Europe: "The sweet dream of universal cultural compatibility has been replaced by the nightmare of permanent conflict." Which sounds an awful lot like a new Dark Ages." Read it all.

Rick and Mark are weathermen... and the forecast is sobering. Bets anyone? Resolved: Chirac is the old Queen and Isabella is the one with cujones.

Good ad, bad ad

Good ad: the Gatorade commercial in which footage of classic sport highlights are altered so Michael Jordan blows a jump shot and Jerry Rice misses a catch against the Raiders. Even with all of today's special-effects and computer-animation technology, I'm at a loss to understand how they did it.

Bad ad: the latest boomer-fellating ad from Ameriprise Financial, showing hippies getting married while the announcer says something like, "you're the generation that changed the nature of true love". Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't this the first generation with a 50% divorce rate?

Too good to be true

Since he was discharged in late 2003, Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey has told audiences all over America about the horrifying atrocities he saw his fellow Marines commit in Iraq. He's shared the stage with Cindy Sheehan, and his book Kill, Kill, Kill, was published in - where else? - France. And cccording to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Massey is full of crap:

[Massey] began turning up in the press and on broadcasts last spring with stories about military atrocities. Massey's primary thrust has been that Marines from his battalion - some of whom, he told a Minneapolis audience, were "psychopathic killers" - recklessly shot and killed Iraqi civilians, sometimes, he said, upon orders from their commanders. During a hearing in Canada, Massey said, "We deliberately gunned down people who were civilians."

Instead, he said, he received his information from "intelligence reports." When asked if those reports were official documents, he answered, "No, that's what the other Marines told me."

Read it all.

France on Fire

The riots are getting worse:

Marauding youths torched nearly 900 vehicles, stoned paramedics and burned a nursery school in a ninth night of violence that spread from Paris suburbs to towns around France, police said Saturday. Authorities arrested more than 250 people overnight — a sweep unprecedented since the unrest began.

In a particularly malevolent turn, youths in the eastern Paris suburb of Meaux prevented paramedics from evacuating a sick person from a housing project, pelting rescuers with rocks and torching the awaiting ambulance, an Interior Ministry official said.
[...]
There appeared to be no coordination among gangs in different areas, Hamon said. Within gangs, however, youths communicated by cell phone text messages or e-mails and warned each other about police, he said.

In Torcy, east of the capital, looters set fire to a youth center and a police station, which were gutted, city hall said. An incendiary device was tossed at the wall of a synagogue in Pierrefitte, northwest of Paris. [emphasis added]

Don't Mess With Tex

Thom Lyons, the former Green Party candidate (and frothing maniac) with whom Tex from "Whacking Day" regularly clashes on usenet, is threatening to sue him. (Update here.)

If you want to sue someone for defamation, you actually need a reputation which concievably could have been damaged in the first place, so I think ol' Thom is out of luck. On the other hand, I think we should commence a class action against Tex for his devious slander of Bender from Futurama.

Quest for Wireless

The Great Canadian Bagel outlet on Elizabeth Avenue doesn't have wireless internet access anymore - I'm not sure if they got rid of it deliberately, or if they're just having trouble with it - but the new retro-look McDonald's on Torbay Road has it. (There's a minimum $3.00 food purchase, but they gave me an access coupon with just a coffee and muffin. Thanks, Ronald.)

A reader tells me Don Cherry's Sports Grill - he didn't say whether it was the one in St. John's, Mt. Pearl or both - is a hot spot, too. If any of my Newfoundland readers know of any other places in St. John's with wireless, let me know in the comments section.

The Invaluable Michael Ledeen...

While Damian is away, I'd like to draw your attention to Michael Ledeen's article in NRO.

A Rich Italian Dinner Feast:
Demonstrating against the anti-Semitism.

"It takes courage to stand up publicly for Israel against the world's leading sponsor of terrorism, especially in contemporary Europe, where anti-Semitism is on the rise, where the Jewish population is minuscule (there are slightly more than 40,000 in all of Italy, less than one percent of Italians), and where the Islamic population is expanding rapidly. I have not noticed any such demonstrations here, for example. But the Italians, as is their wont, have once again broken the stereotype most foreigners hold of them, and have directly challenged the mullahs.

"That would be extraordinary enough, but they have done far more than that. They have lifted the taboo on the discussion of Islam itself, and of the way the Islamic world has dealt with Israel since [its] creation. You know the taboo has been shattered when Magdi Allam, the (Muslim) deputy editor of the Corriere della Sera, Italy's leading newspaper, writes a front-page editorial of the sort that was published earlier this week. Many Muslims, he began, are against the existence of Israel, and many others are afraid they will be called traitors if they approve of it. Allam asks, What will they have betrayed?"

As InstaMan says, "Read the Whole Thing." (And thanks to D! for the opportunity.)

Cheers for Italy! And Cheers for Mr. Ledeen.

Off to St. John's

Blogging may be light until Monday evening - but I know of some wireless hot spots in St. John's (in particular, the Great Canadian Bagel/Buck Weaver's on Elizabeth Avenue), so I'll still post when I get the chance. Have a good one.

City on Fire

Der Spiegel has more on the suburban Paris rioting, including a photo gallery. And AFP interviews some of the rioters, who blame racism and boredom - and one of whom blurts out how this has been allowed to fester for years:

Outside a row of dilapidated tower blocks, burnt out cars dotted here and there, six young men who fought street battles against the police here this week said they planned to continue defying them.

"It's like being in Matrix," the science-fiction film, he said, adding that he liked to see the "riot police in a panic, hiding behind their shields."
[...]
Anger at the boys' deaths has combined with growing resentment over hardline new law-and-order policies put forward by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy.

"Before now, the police could not come into the neighbourhood. Now, they catch you, take you away, insult you about your origins -- they can do anything they like," said one of the group of young men. [emphasis added]

Sarkozy is taking a lot of criticism for referring to the rioters as "scum" and "rabble". I think he's being much more restrained than I would be, under the circumstances. (As this story continues, look for media outlets like Der Spiegel and the Guardian to blame Sarkozy's "American-style" attitude toward law and order for the riots.)

Update: several commentators note that most of the rioters are Muslim, and indeed, I'd certainly like to know what they're being taught in their mosques. But Bob Tarantino and an InstaPundit correspondent say compairsons with the 1992 L.A. riots are more appropriate - a combination of ghettoization, poverty, boredom, racism and resentment reached a boiling point after the Rodney King acquittals, and the city exploded.

I'm inclined to agree, but there's one major difference between Los Angeles in 1992 and Paris in 2005. Many people blamed inner-city poverty for what happened in L.A. - and, indeed, the urban blight you see in some of America's largest cities (especially this one) is absolutely heartbreaking to behold. But in France, the government has given the rioters everything they need to survive - housing, schooling, health care and money. The thing they don't have, in this nation of 12% unemployment, militant unions and the 35-hour work week, is the opportunity to better themselves.

Terrorists in T.O.

The National Post says CSIS broke up an Algerian Islamic terror cell right here in Canada:

Canadian counter- terrorism investigators have dismantled a suspected terrorist cell in Toronto whose members included an al-Qaeda-trained explosives expert, the National Post has learned.

The investigation was described as ongoing.

More than one high-profile terror arrest over the past few years came to nothing, so I'm taking a wait-and-see approach as to whether all the details in the Post story are true. But it would be hopelessly naive for Canadians to assume this sort of thing isn't happening here.

Quote of the Day

Jim Geraghty, on Mary Mapes' book deal: "Dear Lord, if I ever botch a story as badly as Mapes did, and, say, write a huge expose on Kim Jong-Il's inappropriate relationship with a goat, and it turns out that the memo describing said relationship was not actually written in North Korean but merely replaced every instance of the letter "l" with the letter "r", please, please, please let me get a $250,000 book deal with an 11-page excerpt in Vanity Fair and a big glossy photo of me with a dog. Thank you."

(The rest of the article is pretty great, too.)

Week 9

I was 8-6 last week, bringing my season total to 58-58 - yes, I've finally touched the .500 mark. Let's see if I can keep it up:

Atlanta at Miami
Carolina at Tampa Bay - the Bucs have stumbled lately, especially in last week's loss to the pathetic 49ers, but they're still undefeated at home.
Cincinnati at Baltimore - it was only the Packers, but the Bengals bounced back from a tough loss. This team is for real.
Detroit at Minnesota
Houston at Jacksonville
Oakland at Kansas City
San Diego at NY Jets
Tennessee at Cleveland
Seattle at Arizona - upset special. Warner starts for the Cards this weekend, and I still think that offense - with Fitzgerald and Boldin, two excellent young recievers - is set to break out. [Update: a reader tells me Boldin is injured. I'm still sticking with this pick, because I'm insane. - Ed.]
NY Giants at San Francisco
Chicago at New Orleans - we Bears fans are getting cocky.
Pittsburgh at Green Bay - poor Brett Favre.
Philadelphia at Washington - T.O. is listed as "questionable" for this one. Philly native Jonathan Last is calling this "the hard-alcohol portion of the Eagles' season."
Indianapolis at New England - every year, I keep thinking "this will finally the one in which Manning beats the Patriots." But this time, more people than usual are thinking it.

Corruption Kills

The Washington Post says the levees designed to protect New Orleans from flooding may have failed because of shoddy construction:

Investigators yesterday added a possible new explanation for some of the flooding that devastated New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina: contractors who may have skimped on construction materials in building the city's floodwalls and levees.

"What we have right now are stories of malfeasance and some field evidence that seems to correlate with those stories," said Raymond B. Seed, leader of one of three independent teams of experts investigating why the levees failed. Seed, an engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley, said it is not yet clear how big a role such acts played in the failure of the levees.

Will this make it into Michael Moore's next propaganda film? Only if all this fraud happened after January 20, 2001.

Paris is burning

The riots in suburban Paris have been going on for a week, with seemingly no end in sight:

Parisian suburbs have suffered a seventh straight night of violence as youths set fire to dozens of cars in at least nine areas to the north and east of the French capital.

The head of a police union has proposed establishing a curfew and bringing in the military to help handle the rioting, while some members of the opposition Socialist Party have suggested the police should withdraw from the communities to quell the unrest.
[...]
On Tuesday night, the unrest spread to at least nine towns in the suburbs north and northeast of Paris.

But the original cause has been all but forgotten as residents of other communities -- weary of poverty, unemployment and discrimination against the large immigrant and Muslim populations -- have vented their frustration.

With all the Euro-sneering directed toward their country in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, it's understandable if Americans feel quite a bit of schaedenfreude right now. But as Francis Fukuyama noted in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Europe's rapidly growing, increasingly disaffected Muslim immigrant underclass could have serious consequences for the United States and the rest of the world, too:

We have tended to see jihadist terrorism as something produced in dysfunctional parts of the world, such as Afghanistan, Pakistan or the Middle East, and exported to Western countries. Protecting ourselves is a matter either of walling ourselves off, or, for the Bush administration, going "over there" and trying to fix the problem at its source by promoting democracy.

It is in this context that someone like Osama bin Laden appears, offering young converts a universalistic, pure version of Islam that has been stripped of its local saints, customs and traditions. Radical Islamism tells them exactly who they are--respected members of a global Muslim umma to which they can belong despite their lives in lands of unbelief. Religion is no longer supported, as in a true Muslim society, through conformity to a host of external social customs and observances; rather it is more a question of inward belief. Hence Mr. Roy's comparison of modern Islamism to the Protestant Reformation, which similarly turned religion inward and stripped it of its external rituals and social supports.

Martyrdom for Kids

While their President calls for the annihilation of Israel - nothing new for Iranian politicians, despite all the media attention devoted to this one - here's what the children of Iran are being shown on television.

"He may be an SOB, but he's our SOB"

That appears to be Jack Layton's attitude toward the Martin Liberals:

NDP Leader Jack Layton says he won't make a snap decision on whether to topple the Liberal minority government just because fellow opposition leaders Stephen Harper and Gilles Duceppe want him to.
[...]
The leader of the New Democrats says he's asked Martin to consider adopting a number of measures put forward by his party, – such as the ethics reform package, protection for pensions and the environment and a renewed commitment to public health care – before making a decision.

"If [Martin is] willing to take action on a few key issues over the next few weeks, then perhaps we can wait until the election in the winter," said Layton. "If not, then clearly the parliament serves no positive purpose."

This is the closest the NDP ever gets to actually running the country, so I guess I can understand where Layton is coming from. But it's a neat trick to keep propping up one of the most corrupt governments in Canadian history, so you can push through an ethics reform package. Colby Cosh has more.

Racism - for a good cause, of course

I'm not sure what's more revolting about this story in the Washington Times: the blatantly racist attacks against Michael Steele, the African-American GOP candidate for Maryland governor, or Black Democrats' self-serving justification for such attacks.

Black Democratic leaders in Maryland say that racially tinged attacks against Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele in his bid for the U.S. Senate are fair because he is a conservative Republican.

Such attacks against the first black man to win a statewide election in Maryland include pelting him with Oreo cookies during a campaign appearance, calling him an "Uncle Tom" and depicting him as a black-faced minstrel on a liberal Web log.

Operatives for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) also obtained a copy of his credit report -- the only Republican candidate so targeted.

But black Democrats say there is nothing wrong with "pointing out the obvious."

"There is a difference between pointing out the obvious and calling someone names," said a campaign spokesman for Kweisi Mfume, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate and former president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

State Sen. Lisa A. Gladden, a black Baltimore Democrat, said she does not expect her party to pull any punches, including racial jabs at Mr. Steele, in the race to replace retiring Democratic U.S. Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes.

"Party trumps race, especially on the national level," she said. "If you are bold enough to run, you have to take whatever the voters are going to give you. It's democracy, perhaps at its worse, but it is democracy."

Delegate Salima Siler Marriott, a black Baltimore Democrat, said Mr. Steele invites comparisons to a slave who loves his cruel master or a cookie that is black on the outside and white inside because his conservative political philosophy is, in her view, anti-black.

"Because he is a conservative, he is different than most public blacks, and he is different than most people in our community," she said. "His politics are not in the best interest of the masses of black people." [emphasis added]

A deranged lunatic like Louis Farrakhan, who claims to have flown in a flying saucer and that White people were created in a lab by a mad scientist (and who blindly repeats White supremacist propaganda), is more acceptable to "mainstream" Black leaders than someone who, say, opposes affirmative action. That's America in 2005.

The Old South in the Far East

"Japanese Only" signs are popping up in hotels, restaurants and bars all over Japan. (via Relapsed Catholic)

Jews don't count

A small but telling omission from the Archbishop of Canterbury's sermon in remembrance of the London bombing victims.

Only public cynicism can save the Liberals now

In the wake of the Gomery report, the Canadian Press finds that most Canadians are resigned to the fact that all politicians are crooks, no matter what their political affiliation. So who cares whether we hold an election before Christmas? Or who gets in?

Their reactions ranged from skeptical to resigned to unconcerned, but a sampling of opinion from Canadians on Tuesday revealed few signs of fresh outrage or a bloodlust for ballot-box revenge following the release of the report into the federal sponsorship boondoggle.

"The truly cathartic moment was several months ago when the proverbial shit hit the fan and all the revelations surfaced at the inquiry," Reid said from Vancouver. "It was a very emotional story, but we've already worked through many of our emotions on it."
[...]
There was evidence on city streets across the country Tuesday to suggest Canadians don't place much faith in politicians or authorities of any stripe in the wake of the sponsorship scandal.

"It's the wrong time. I think it will be the same, and every party will be the same," he said. "It is just who gets caught."

The NDP will decide over the next few days whether it will join the Tories and Bloc against the Liberals.

"Who allowed this Black guy to have his own opinions?"

From an editorial on the Alito nomination in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: "In losing a woman, the court with Alito would feature seven white men, one white woman and a black man, who deserves an asterisk because he arguably does not represent the views of mainstream black America."

I'm not sure whether I should laugh or cry when I hear people denouncing Black conservatives like Thomas as "sellouts", as though they somehow took the easier path in adopting political views opposed by the overwhelming majority of their fellow African-Americans. On the contrary, when I see them forced to put up with this shit, I'm left in awe of their courage and determination.

Chretien's going to court

Da liddle guy is giving a televised press conference right now, and he says he's taking the Gomery findings to Federal Court. More to come...

Update: CTV report here.

Chretien blamed; Martin "exonerated"

The Gomery report is out, and I guess we're expected to believe the federal Liberals of 2005 are completely separate from the federal Liberals of 1999, that the friggin' finance minister when this mess was going on had no idea what was really happening, and that we're all supposed to say everything is all better now and that we can keep electing the Liberals in perpetuity.

Bullshit. It's the same party - a party that believes it is the very embodiment of this nation, with an inalienable right to govern - and there should be consequences come election time:

Justice John Gomery says former Prime Minister Jean Chretien and his closest advisers must shoulder most of the responsibility for the sponsorship spending fiasco that Gomery describes as "a story of greed, venality and misconduct."

Gomery describes Pelletier as Chretien's "closest collaborator."

The report, which I'm sure we'll all be awake all night reading, is online here. Warren Kinsella's desperate spin - basically, Jean Chretien was right to keep things quiet, Martin ruined everything by calling a biased commission of inquiry, Judge Gomery is a Chretien-hating poopy-head, and Quebec is going to separate not because of Adscam but because of the inquiry meant to investigate it - can be read here.

Update: a commenter takes me to task:

Damian, it sounds like you had your mind made up long before the report came out. If the report blamed Martin, you'd hail it as justice. Now that it exonerates him, you call it "bullshit."

Let the spinning and criticisms begin.

I plead guilty to being biased against the federal Liberals. But my comments were directed more toward the inevitable pro-Martin spin and the people who will fall for it, not the Gomery report itself.

Still, Martin was seated at the right hand of Chretien himself, and controlled the public purse, but had no idea this was going on? I gotta admit, I'm having trouble buying it.

Update II: Kinsella, who will threaten to sue you if you even look at him funny, openly accuses Gomery of lying and making up evidence:

Gomery utterly destroys his credibility - and exposes his flagrant bias - when he actually states that the evidence "exonerates" Paul Martin. Gomery and Martin certainly want Canadians to believe that, but they won't. The guy who wrote the "Cher Claude" letter about sponsorship dollars knew nothing? The guy who was forced to admit he wrote the cheques? The guy who attended Quebec caucus and Quebec minister meetings, where sponsorship was regularly discussed, knew nothing? Bullshit. It's a bald-faced lie, and Canadians know it.
[...]
Gomery disregarded evidence. He quoted evidence wrongly. He spun evidence, he even seemed to make evidence up.

I wonder if this has anything to do with it?

Update III: Bob Tarantino thinks Kinsella may have a point about Martin being "exonerated", though he uses much less provocative language. As usual, he also has some interesting commentary about how the opposition parties will react (including some choice words for the Conservatives).

Angry in T.O. isn't impressed with Jack Layton's reaction, either. (As long as we're rounding up blog reaction, is this going to get Andrew Coyne blogging again?)

Sweeps Week in Iran

While the President of Iran calls for the extermination of the Jewish state, here's what's being shown on Iranian television. (See also part 2 and part 3.)

Noam Chomsky, genocide denier

In an extraordinary interview with Guardian reporter Emma Brockes, the world's favorite intulleckshul says the anti-Jewish pogroms of Russia weren't as bad as people say, and that the Srebrenica massacre never happened - and even if it did, the revisionists at Living Marxism magazine did an outstanding job saying it didn't happen:

Chomsky's activism has its roots in his childhood. He grew up in the depression of the 1930s, the son of William Chomsky and Elsie Simonofsky, Russian immigrants to Philadelphia. He describes the family as "working-class Jews", most of whom were unemployed, although his parents, both teachers, were lucky enough to work. There was no sense of America as the promised land: "It wasn't much of an opportunity-giver in my immediate family," he says, although it was an improvement on the pogroms of Russia, which none the less Chomsky can't help qualifying as "not very bad, by contemporary standards. In the worst of the major massacres, I think about 49 people were killed."
[...]
He is asked to lend his name to all sorts of crackpot causes and she tries to intervene to keep his schedule under control. As some see it, one ill-judged choice of cause was the accusation made by Living Marxism magazine that during the Bosnian war, shots used by ITN of a Serb-run detention camp were faked. The magazine folded after ITN sued, but the controversy flared up again in 2003 when a journalist called Diane Johnstone made similar allegations in a Swedish magazine, Ordfront, taking issue with the official number of victims of the Srebrenica massacre. (She said they were exaggerated.) In the ensuing outcry, Chomsky lent his name to a letter praising Johnstone's "outstanding work". Does he regret signing it?

But Chomsky insists that "LM was probably correct" and that, in any case, it is irrelevant. "It had nothing to do with whether LM or Diane Johnstone were right or wrong." It is a question, he says, of freedom of speech. "And if they were wrong, sure; but don't just scream well, if you say you're in favour of that you're in favour of putting Jews in gas chambers."

Oliver Kamm, who's been on a heroic, one-man anti-Chomsky crusade in recent weeks, has more here and here.

He was only the Finance Minister. What could he have known?

The Gomery report will be released to the public at 10AM Eastern time today - and the Liberal spin machine has already been jacked up to ludicrous speed:

Former prime minister Jean Chrétien will get hit with a finding of blame by Mr. Justice John Gomery today, but Prime Minister Paul Martin will not, The Globe and Mail has learned.

As finance minister, Mr. Martin was involved in the 1996 decision to boost Mr. Chrétien's national-unity reserve by $50-million a year — a discretionary fund that was used to create the sponsorship program. Judge Gomery likely believed Mr. Martin's assertion that he was not aware of details of how the money was spent.
[...]
The Liberal spin machine started gearing up last night to defend against the negative fallout of Judge Gomery's first report, while opposition parties railed against the fact that the Prime Minister's Office had received it 12 hours before them.

Mr. Martin argued last week that he was only responding to Judge Gomery's wishes by getting an early peek at the report, but Judge Gomery issued a letter yesterday saying he only approved the release of the report to the top bureaucrat in the country.

Update: dissonance and disrespect: "Martin Not A Crook, Just An Idiot".