The Lasso of Truth

A long way from a land of convicts

I shit you not...

Australians may have a love of plain speaking but new laws are set to curtail some of their more colourful language with police issuing on-the-spot fines for obnoxious swearing.

The country's second most populous state Victoria is due to approve new legislation this week under which police will be able to slap fines of up to Aus$240 (US$257) on people using offensive words or phrases.

I bet the producers of Demolition Man are shaking their heads, wondering how they could have written a satire so true to real life...

I wake up every morning with large breasts, too...

In fact, I paid good money for the affliction.  But I haven't found it hinders my dating prospects.

Maybe Ms. Meghan should consider the appeal of a gal who sprinkles the word "like" into every sentence as if it's a Tourettes-like tic.  I've found that to be as bad as a cold sore, for inspiring respect and attraction in the opposite sex.

But that's just me.

Child Abuse

With progressives, it often comes under the guise of giving their children the "freedom to choose".  Sometimes it's being too permissive toward the little snowflake's temper-fueled outbursts, or letting him dictate the family's dinner menu, and the like.

But why stop at these petty little exercises in lazy parental neglect, when you can inculcate your child with the notion that gender - a naturally occurring selection process completed in the womb before birth - is just a construct that you can pick and choose at will?

When Storm was born, the couple sent an email to friends and family: “We've decided not to share Storm's sex for now — a tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation, a stand up to what the world could become in Storm's lifetime (a more progressive place? ...).”

The genderless child.  I suppose we'll have to come up with a new cardboard lawn stork for that one. 

Sadly, inflicting the mental damage of giving their child no discernible identity is also just the tip of the iceberg for this sweet little family of mental eunuchs...

The family challenges the norm on other issues, too. They practice “unschooling,” an offshoot of home-schooling that centres on the belief a child’s learning should be curiosity driven. They believe children can make meaningful choices for themselves, like choosing their own clothing and how to wear their hair. And the family co-sleeps, curling up together at night on two mattresses pushed together.

Remember when I said I don't approve of the government telling people how to parent their children?  Ya, scratch that.

More on the gender-denialists here...

Both Mrs Witterick and Mr Stocker grew up in very liberal families. They have visited revolutionaries in Mexico and spent weeks in Cuba learning about the Communist revolution.

You don't say...

Crikey

Hey Mikey, remember that trip we planned to one day take, to Australia?  Well, we may have to put it on hold, indefinately...

The proposed Australian Government clampdown on smut just got a whole lot broader, as news emerged of a ban on small breasts and female ejaculation in adult material.

The end result of this widening of the censor’s net could be the addition of millions of websites to the internet filter now being proposed.

Breasts came under the spotlight a year ago, as Senators Barnaby Joyce and Guy Barnett commenced a campaign against publicly available porn. Rounding up magazines from corner shops and filling stations, Senator Joyce claimed that publications featuring small-breasted women were encouraging paedophilia.

Not that I don't agree that itty-bitty tatas are a crying shame, but I don't think they should be illegal.  It's just that I don't think I could go to a country with people so stupid they think that small breasts somehow encourage pedophilia.

The Literal Nanny-State

Via Kathy...

I think the thing that is pushing me over the edge with graduate school is that people who are thinking straight about schooling are not even considering graduate school. These people are debating if college is a rip off (here's a great discussion in New York magazine with James Altucher, a venture capitalist in NYC) And people are even debating if high school is useless (here's a great blog by Lisa Nielsen who is with the NYC Department of Education). And anyway, I'm losing interest in the debate about grad school because I'm convinced that the future belongs to home schoolers because they are self-learners. [LINK]

Well, tell that to the Quebec judge who just ordered a perfectly good set of home-schooling parents to enroll their children in state-run school so they could be more "socialized".  Judging by the state of public education (especially in Quebec) I expect this "socialization" to have the emphasis on the "socialist" part of the term.

What have things come to when caring responsible parents, against whom there have been no accusations of abuse or neglect, cannot make a simple parenting choice about the education of their children?  Sounds like what Quebec needs more of, is guns...and a revolutionary spirit.

In fact, we could all use a little more of that these days.

Entitlement

I had to shake my head several times, and this story still makes it hurt...

Chicago Public Schools is apologizing to a Chicago mother and her two young sons, ages 5 and 6, after they were denied breakfast because they came to schools wearing the wrong kind of shoes.

The Nicholson brothers only grab a quick snack before heading to class because they qualify for a full free breakfast at Adam Powell Grade School. It’s something they look forward to every day, and it hurt when they were recently turned away.

They were wearing black athletic shoes. The boys told their mom that the assistant principal, Angela Peagler wouldn’t let them eat because their shoes didn’t fit the school uniform, which calls for a regular black dress shoe.

“I felt sad. We’re always supposed to have breakfast,” first-grader Noah Nicholson says.

Noah and his brother Niko, who is in kindergarten, went to class hungry and didn’t eat until lunch.
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“It hasn’t been a problem all this time and all of a sudden they can’t have breakfast because of their shoes,” Kahlia Edwards, the boys’ mother, says.

Edwards says the boys have been wearing the shoes all year and administrators never complained. She’s confused.

The boy’s great aunt is livid.

“I don’t care if they had on orange shoes, they were in line to eat,” Robin Price  says. “I’m not going to feed you because you have the wrong shoes? Shoes? No, no.”

Nevermind the stupid shoes...these kids deliberately leave the house without eating, their mother and great aunt don't feel the need to provide the simple necessity of breakfast to them, before they leave for school in the morning, and they dare to take humbrage when the poor little snowflakes get turned out of the food line????!!!?

What the hell is wrong with these people?

Worse yet...these boys are 5 and 6 and are already learning to depend on the state's charity for the basic necessities of life.  A lesson clearly learned from and perpetuated by mom and her sister.

Outstanding.

Where has personal responsibility gone?

Apparently, getting sauced is a perfectly acceptable excuse to get away with any number of crimes these days...

A judge has reopened a major legal controversy by ruling that accused people can claim they were too drunk to be found culpable of committing crimes.

Presiding over a sexual assault case in Southwestern Ontario, Mr. Justice Terrence Patterson of the Superior Court of Ontario ruled that Parliament violated the Charter of Rights with a 1995 law that prohibits the so-called defence of excessive intoxication.

The ruling opened the door for Carl Frederick Fleming, 62, to argue that he was too drunk to appreciate his actions when he sexually assaulted a St. Thomas, Ont., woman in 2009.

Even worse though, will be the predictable caterwauling we will hear from the hypocrites on the slut-walk side of the spectrum, arguing that a drunk man who sexually assaults someone should be held responsible for his actions, but a drunk woman who dresses like a hooker and wanders into the woods with a perfect stranger should not be.

Two legs good, three legs bad?

Just a pillar of the community

Living up to everything his community values, and dying with a bullet in his face...

Clifenton Ford died around 2:25 a.m. at G’s Chill & Grill, on Eglinton Ave. E. near Midland Ave.

Family and friends said Ford was the father of 10 children ranging in age from 6 to 17, born to six different mothers.

Ford’s fiancée, Ayisha Spence, 28, refused to leave until his body was taken out of the bar. “We can’t leave him here,” she said, clutching one of Ford’s T-shirts close to her chest because it smelled like him.

Spence is the mother of two of Ford’s children, an 8-year-old girl and 7-year-old boy. She said her fiancé worked as a janitor at a fitness facility and was “finally settling his life.”

“He was a great father,” Spence said. “He was a great son. He was an all-around amazing man.”

"All-around" being the operative term here, apparently.

She showed up at the crime scene when one of the other "baby mamas" called her to tell her the bad news, they were all so very close.  All 6 of them, and their 10 fatherless children.

Clearly, what this community needs is an afri-centric school.

The feeble Liberal mind

It feels "uncomfortable" with employing a "judgmental" "tone" when discussing things like spousal abuse and honour killings, in official government literature introducing new Canadians to their new home.

Well shucks, we wouldn't want to alienate any of those wife beaters/murderers with "pejorative" words that might discourage them from bringing their barbaric cultural customs here.

Jeezus.

Oh, Canada!

A new survey finds that nearly half of Canadians have managed to retain some semblance of common sense, despite the valiant efforts of poverty interests and government "sensitivity" campaigns...

A new poll commissioned by the Salvation Army finds that many Canadians hold some less-than-charitable views when it comes to the poor, including that those of meagre means would "take advantage" of any help and would "do nothing" with it.

The poll, conducted by Angus Reid in late January, also found that about 25 per cent of Canadians think that poor people are lazy and have low moral values.

With very rare exceptions, all poor people are in those circumstances as a consequence of bad choices:  Choosing to use drugs, choosing to marry an asshole, choosing a cellphone as 46" flatscreen over baby pablum.  I HAVE BEEN THERE, and I can trace back through the misery of my previous experience to each and every bad choice I made, that only made my circumstances worse.  AND I can trace back to all the hard choices and sacrifices I made that dragged my stupid butt (and that of my blameless son) out of it.

Sadly, The Salvation Army, and the rest of the poverty pimps, are all too happy to perpetuate the myth that poverty is something that just happens to you while you're walking around, minding your own business...

Spokesperson Andrew Burditt told The Canadian Press that many of the 1,025 adults polled "didn't really understand the extent to which systemic barriers can get in the way of really providing a life for yourself and that does rob you of your dignity."

What dignity is there in taking money from your neighbours, to pay for your irresponsible choices?  I'd say 1,025 of adults polled understand the systemic root causes of poverty more than The Salvation Army does.

Priorities

It tells you everything you need to know about this messed up country, that the bill to allow "gender variant individuals" to use whichever public washroom/change room they "identify" with is heading into final reading in Parliament, and could be law within a few weeks. 

Meanwhile, the bill to allow fathers equal parenting rights in custody cases in family court is stalled until at least the fall, when it will just enter the debate stage.

Shaping young minds

Most mornings I pack 6 school lunches.  1 cream cheese bagel or croissant in a Ziploc bag, a handful of baby carrots in a Ziploc bag, slices apples dredged in lemon juice in a Ziploc bag, two-bite brownies in a Ziploc bag, and a fruit cup or pudding with a disposable plastic spoon.  I used to even send a juice box or disposable juice bottle, until I figured it would be less expensive to use jug juice and refillable bottles.  That was an economical decision.  The rest of the choices are motivated by expense and time constraints.

I expect my children have all been summarily labeled offenders in the first degree for some time now, by the eco-tyrants in their classrooms…

A couple in Laval, Que., has sparked a fierce debate over how far schools should go to teach children about environmental responsibility after their six-year-old son was shut out of a kindergarten draw to win a stuffed animal because he had an environmentally unfriendly sandwich bag in his lunch box.

Marc-Andre Lanciault said he hadn't heard of the school's draw or any environmental policy until his wife, Isabel Theoret, was making their son Felix a sandwich and he begged them not to put it in a plastic bag.

"He said, 'No mommy, you can't do that. Not a Ziploc,' " Mr. Lanciault said.

Through tears, the boy told his parents that the school had held a draw to win a stuffed teddy bear and only children who didn't have any plastic sandwich bags could enter.

I’ve already made the school resoundingly aware of how I feel about the nauseating bacterial science project that comes home under the “boomerang” lunch project (where children bring their lunch garbage back home).  Do you have any idea what a pudding cup looks like when it’s been baking in a thermal lunch bag all day?  Imagine the frantic reports that would be made to various agencies if it was me who forced my child to traipse back and forth to school with festering food garbage in their backpack!

On a day when we have all the children, I routinely run our dishwasher on an average of 3 times a day.  If I migrated to the so-called “sustainable” containers (ie. Tupperware) that the school encourages, it would add at least one more load each day.  Don’t tell me that is more “environmentally responsible” than a handful of Ziploc bags.  And even if it was, tough!  I already have enough work to do, making sure 6 kids get fed and dressed and off to school in time with a healthy lunch, and I already do enough dishes.

Death by Social Worker

What would motivate the poor and under-educated to work and strive to improve their fortunes, if they didn’t have the greener pastures on the other side of the street to look to..?

In a first for Ontario, a Niagara-area school opening this fall will only admit low-income students whose parents don’t have a college or university education.

While raising concerns about stigmatizing poor children, the board has approved the initiative saying the current system doesn’t serve them well and that similar U.S. schools have proved successful.

If you insulate them from seeing or experiencing uneven or disadvantaged circumstances, how would they even know there is more to be had out there?

My Advice to "Concerned Neighbours"

If just one "yob" gets a gun muzzle to the face, ten other "yobs" will think twice next time.

Just sayin'.

Oh, Canada!

Where 3 masked thugs can firebomb your house in the middle of the night - with you in it - but you are the one facing charges...

The incident began six years of trouble for Mr. Thomson that culminated early one Sunday morning last August when the 53-year-old former mobile-crane operator woke up to the sound of three masked men firebombing his Port Colborne, Ont., home.

“I was horrified,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know what was happening. I had no idea what was going on.”

So Mr. Thomson, a former firearms instructor, grabbed one of his Smith & Wesson revolvers from his safe, loaded it and headed outside dressed in only his underwear.

“He exited his house and fired his revolver two, maybe three times, we’re not sure. Then these firebombing culprits, they ran off,” said his lawyer, Edward Burlew.

His surveillance cameras caught the attackers lobbing at least six Molotov cocktails at his house and bombing his doghouse, singeing one of his Siberian Huskies. But when Mr. Thomson handed the video footage to Niagara Regional Police, he found himself charged with careless use of a firearm.

The local Crown attorney’s office later laid a charge of pointing a firearm, along with two counts of careless storage of a firearm. The Crown has recommended Mr. Thomson go to jail, his lawyer said.

Gender Politics

How long before it becomes a compulsory part of the public school curriculum..?

King City Public pull pulled the plug on the "Opposite Gender Day," when kids as young as six would be allowed to come to school dressed as the opposite sex, following an outcry from parents.

[..]

The chance to dress as the opposite sex was voluntary for students from junior kindergarten to Grade 8, Virgo said.

It was proposed by the school's student council to principal Karen Goan, he said. 
 

"They discussed the fun the day might generate, plus how the experience might help boys and girls understand a bit more what it felt like to be a member of the opposite sex ... that was the plan," he said.

Just lend little Madison your strap-on and slap some lipstick and stilettos on Liam and toddle them off to school then.

Maybe school has changed since I was there, but this sounds like a perfect recipe for getting a beating in the hall.  And that is as it should be.

Fiscal Genius

First, he roots around in the sofa cushions and finds $100 million he didn't know he had.

Now we find out His Royal Hairness forgot to carry the one and account for a little thing we like to call inflation...

David Peterson, who led Toronto’s successful bid to host the 2015 Pan Am Games, helped sway city council’s support with this classic quote, early in the process: “This is a chance for Toronto to have a great party with no hangover whatsoever.”

Now that the city’s bill has doubled, with four years of adjustments still to come, you can bet many councillors are today asking, what was he drinking?

[..]

At an executive committee meeting Monday, a number of councillors sounded stunned about various parts of a bill that suddenly has doubled. Mayor Rob Ford said he was “blindsided.”

They have a point. No one, anywhere, predicted the city’s costs would double, from $49.5 million to more than $97 million.

There was a small warning in 2009, but in the city’s 2010 budget, the potential for cost escalation had disappeared.

Then — boom — the Pan Am team demands another $47 million.

There are two key elements to the doubling of the price tag. The first is $22 million to clean up the old Morningside landfill site, so the Pan Am pool complex in Scarborough can be put on top of it. Surprise!

The second big bill is for inflation, a whopping $21.3 million, because the city budgeted for the games in 2008 dollars. Who budgets for 2015 using 2008 numbers?

I wonder where this stone cold fiscal prowess has led him to now?

outstanding.

Cuttin' to the chase

As usual...

Pencils, pens... or even bleeding edge laptop computers... do not write lyrical poetry. Parachutes... even negligently packed... do not smash the life out of innocent, random people. Cars... even rip-snorting 400 horsepower street racers... do not chase down pedestrians like panicked bunnies... and guns... even the dark & dastardly Glock... do not foment murder.

So instead of trying to divert all the attention here to an inanimate object... be it a length of pipe, a snowplow, or yes... even a handgun... perhaps you could explain, how not discussing letting obviously mentally defective people with flagrantly violent ideation carom consequence-free throughout the larger field of folk is some sort of inconsequential side-issue.

Amen brother.

Oh Canada!

Not the least bit embarassed to be this pathetically stupid.

Eat it, losers...

 

UPDATE:  And after spending the last 5 hours listening to Canadian talk radio, I don't believe I have ever heard the word "faggot" used so many times -- ever, just in the telling of this story.  Mission accomplished guys!  It's nice to see there are still a few talking heads in this country with their balls intact.

Blessing of Celebrity # 392

Not having to answer the obvious and embarrassing questions about your irresponsible and destructive behaviour...

“You just get really drunk all the time. Which is awesome! At least I did anyway, it's not very professional. There's a Bloody Mary at 10 a.m. and keep it going all day!

You know, it was actually very liberating and amazing to play somebody who just didn't think about consequences because I'm so responsible with my life and too worried about everybody and my kids and where's everybody going. This character is like total opposite. In a way it was kinda fun, you know? I was sad when it ended because it was nice to play someone who just had no responsibility.”

Like...Where were little Apple and Moses while Mommy was getting sauced all day?

Bonus Blessing:  Not having to answer such questions to Child Services.

All due respect to Fun Boy Three

But the lunatics no longer need to take over the asylum.  Most of them never end up seeing the inside of it anyway...

In 1950, a person who was behaving oddly stood a good chance of being hospitalized. It might be for observation for a few days or a few weeks. If the doctors decided that this person was mentally ill, they would be committed, perhaps for a few months, perhaps longer. Hospital space was always at a premium, so generally, if someone was kept, there was a reason for it. The notion that large numbers of sane people were kept for no reason just has not survived my research efforts.

Brings to mind, the senseless bloody murder of Tim McLean.  And the shockingly bucolic treatment granted to his killer - a man who violently stabbed a total stranger, sawed off his head and shovelled bits and pieces of the body down his gullet during a 4-hour standoff with police.

Regulating everyone into their "indoor voice"

Your required reading assignment for the day...

Living in an era that forces editorial cartoonists into witness protection, in a culture that barely bats an eye when the fed­eral government prosecutes "indecent" films, the free speech battles of the past seem almost quaint by comparison. Recall that in 1968, a jury huffed that I Am Curious: Yellow, a plodding Swedish film that succeeded in making sex unsexy, was "utterly without social value." The decision was soon overturned on appeal, the forecasted moral collapse failed to materialize, and Swedish embassies across Christendom were left unmo­lested. Andres Serrano’s photograph "Piss Christ," the Brooklyn Museum’s “Sensation” exhibit, Robert Mapplethorpe’s bullwhip all provoked pickets, editorials, angry letters—and they all provoked debate.

In 1989, when Iran’s theocracy suborned the murder of novelist Salman Rushdie for having written a supposedly blasphemous book, The Satanic Verses, only a handful of intellectuals, habitués of both left and right, attacked the author for being impolite to "a billion" religious adherents. Author Roald Dahl whimpered that “In a civilized world we all have a moral obligation to apply a modicum of censorship to our own work in order to reinforce this principle of free speech.” Twenty years ago this was a shockingly contrarian sentiment, today it’s depressingly de rigueur.

Important to bear in mind, as you hear more calls for a law to curb incendiary speech.

Glenn Reynolds characterizes it as blood libel

For the less refined among us, it looks more like they're smearing their hands in the blood of the dead and making cutesy little finger paintings with it...

A lot has been made of Sarah Palin's now infamous graphic showing which Congressmen her PAC was "targeting" for defeat using cross hairs. Politics uses war imagery -- just as any cause does ("war on cancer" "battle against X" and the "fight against Y"). I just don't see a connection between the cross hairs and shooting Gabrielle Giffords and think you have to be an idiot to make such a connection...

Idiot is a charitable way to put it.  I somehow doubt I'm the only person who considered the possibility that Warren typed his post with only one hand.  In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if he types every post that way.

NOT satire

In a shockingly unpredictable move, the Halton District Catholic School Board decides to align school policies with Catholic doctrine.

I know.  Weird, huh?

Mocking the Eco-tards

It really should be an Olympic sport...

It made sense. At last I understood the self-flagellation part of this faith. We were to inconvenience ourselves with no discernible end, save the faith that the practice alone would make us feel better about our impact on this planet. All our self-loathing could be expunged by a constant regiment of minimal corporal punishment, eating tree bark. Just like in other religions, I gathered, suffering was beautiful to them. I looked around and it was working; they were all so beautiful in their conviction. I threw my arms around Stephen in a supportive hug and the Grape-Nuts fell.

[..]

"Oh, I almost forgot. I brought everyone gifts!" I ran back to my trunk and pulled out a box of books and started passing them around. "I'm hoping we can adopt it kind of as our own bible."

 "The Lorax by Dr. Suess?"

"It's got a good message we can all get behind. Also, it's short and there're pictures. After we're done here we can all go up in my balloon and read it together!"

Festivus comes early!

The next time one of your public-service-working neighbours complains about layoffs and contract cutbacks, I suggest you remind them that it's all in the name of "human rights"...

Representatives from 47 nations are set to gather Friday in Geneva for a meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council with plans to address the human rights abuses of one country in particular: the United States of America.  Joining in the airing of grievances against the U.S. are various left-wing interest groups and American labor unions.

On the agenda for Friday’s gathering are the testimonials of select organizations and individuals who, for the first time ever, plan to claim the U.S. is violating global human rights — including allegations of discrimination against Muslims, police brutality and wrongful detention of certain political prisoners. The exercise comes as part of the UN’s “Universal Periodic Review” (UPR), a rotating periodic examination of various countries‘ human rights records by the council’s members — a council which includes such countries as China, Cuba, Libya and Saudi Arabia.

And suddenly...

The Toronto Mayoral race becomes a tight one between Ford, or Not Ford.

And I would be remiss in my duties as snarky blogtress if I did not point out how magnificently Rocco Rossi's campaign exploded, coincidentally the very moment he recruited Warren Kinsella as the kick-ass-and-take-names volunteer of the year.

High five Special K!

I'd rather vote for Jack Layton

If this story is even a little bit true, the Conservative Party of Canada deserves to be blasted to political oblivion for at least a generation...

Julian Fantino, for years Ontario’s best known and highest-ranking cop, will be the Conservative candidate in the Vaughan federal by-election when it’s called by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the Toronto Star has learned.

A senior government source said “he’s going for it, no doubt” — even as the Prime Minister’s office tried to douse expectations that the former Ontario Provincial Police commissioner was making the leap to federal politics.

“I was told it was a done deal,” another senior Conservative said.

Fantino would be expected to ultimately land in cabinet if the Conservatives are re-elected.

Getting the retired and often controversial hard-nosed, law and order former Toronto police chief is considered a coup for the federal Conservatives, who have been courting him for some time.

Ontario Progressive Conservatives were also trying to woo Fantino to run at the provincial level.

If Julian "Caledonia" Fantino is the Conservative's idea of "most eligible bachelor", they have no business wrapping themselves in the fake mantle of "law and order" they have been assuming of late.

The bigger question I have, is why Fantino wouldn't run to be MP of Haldimand County?  Hmmm?

I've been a mother for almost 17 years

And I like to think I'm a "good mother", but at no point have I ever even considered there would be an appropriate situation to put a pillow over one of my children's faces.

A maternal flaw for which my children are utterly grateful.  Or so they told me this morning, when they heard about this woman's madness.

What I want to know is...

When will they be sending a bill to the "government" of Saudi Arabia, for the additional security implemented in the US ever since 16 of their citizens lit a few fires of their own?

In fact, it's not out of line to bill them for the clean up, too, I guess.