The Lasso of Truth

I am speechless

This is truly one of the most tragic stories I have ever heard...

A "baby-faced" 12-year-old in Florida may spend the rest of his life in jail for the murder of his 2-year-old half brother.

Cristian Fernandez allegedly killed the toddler in March. Last week, the boy was indicted by a grand jury for first-degree murder, the first time someone so young has faced such a serious charge in Jacksonville.

If convicted, he would be sentenced to life in prison without parole.

[..]

The 2-year-old, David Galarriago, was hospitalized on March 14 after being "physically battered" by his older sibling, according to a police report.

The child suffered "a skull fracture, subdural hemorrhage, subdural hematoma, bruising on the left eye, and bruising on the bridge of his nose."

While the toddler was in the hospital, police said Fernandez confessed to beating him. He also allegedly admitted to having broken his younger brother's leg in January.

Two days after he was savagely attacked, David died.

[..]

Fernandez's mother was only 12 years old when she gave birth to him, Mason said. The two ended up in foster care together, and his grandmother was a drug addict.

The boy was also the victim of child abuse at the hands of his stepfather, who shot and killed himself in front of the boy last year

But I am still hard-assed enough to hope this boy goes away for the rest of his life, at the very least for the sake of whatever is left of his community.

If you're in the Ottawa area on June 8...

The Free Thinking Film Society is hosting an evening with Bruce Bawer & Hege Storhaug...

Hege Storhaug is the information director of Human Rights Service in Norway and the author of several books on immigration and integration, forced marriage, women in Pakistan, and related subjects.

Bruce Bawer is an internationally-acclaimed author, whose recent book is "Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom"

[..]

Bruce has translated Hege's new book, "But the Greatest of These Is Freedom: The Consequences of Immigration in Europe." — the authorized English translation of the explosive Norwegian bestseller about the consequences of immigration in Europe.

Location and ticket information can be found here.

LOVE this guy

Advice both Mikey and I could have used 15 years ago, from the newest resident of the Justice League - The NoNonsense Man...

Chapter 10 of my book, The Man's No-Nonsense Guide to Women, is called 'Marc's Ten Commandments' (page 133). Here they are:

1. Look in the mirror before peering through a window
2. Men and women are from Earth; never accept or tolerate a woman from any other planet
3. Make only those demands on a woman that you place on yourself
4. Accept only those demands from a woman that she places on herself
5. If you keep doing the same things, you will keep getting the same results
6. Always obey your instincts; always update your instincts
7. When meeting a woman, what you see is what you get. If you don't like it, move on. Never:
   a. Be on a mission to change her
   b. Fall in love with her potential----what you think she could/should become
8. A relationship's future must be gauged by its heartbeat, not its history or its potential
9. Remember that life is short----happiness, loneliness, and dysfunction are choices
10. Never stay in a relationship where you spend a lot of time avoiding pain.

Don't scoff ladies.  This applies to you too!  Buy his book and give a copy to every henpecked man you know.

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?

Consider it a lead in to the world of Anthem

With all due respect to my intellectual betters, though I have no doubt there will be valid criticisms to be levied against the new Atlas Shrugged movie, this one seems to be so obtuse as to have come from someone who hadn’t even bothered to read the book…

O’Rourke goes on to make a point I’ve made here previously, which is that Shrugged’s producers really should’ve considered either: a) setting the film in some sort of ‘alternate’ future, in which trains were not considered the most vital means of transportation (requiring some alteration of Rand’s basic storyline), or; b) simply setting the film in an ‘alternate’ version of 1957, when the novel was actually published.

I suppose as a shallow observation this would ring true, but if the movie stayed true to the tenor of the novel, even the first time I read it the theme that stood out most prominently to me was that of a future America in social and industrial decline.  Starting from the first page, it is obvious that it’s humming industrial engine is slowly breaking down, losing all its vital parts.  The entire book is sprinkled with tiny vignettes that serve as marks of the decline – towns where roads have been neglected back to dirt and impoverished hovels reverting back to horse and cart for travel, due to a decline in manufacturing and rationing of fuel.

When Rand spends so much time painting the picture of an environment where technology, innovation and success have been stifled for decades, what could possibly lead the reader/watcher to expect a future where cross-continental travel is accomplished by any means that would require those vital incentives to exist?

At the dawn of the industrial revolution, a cross-continental railroad was a symbol of the height of man’s accomplishment.  We have progressed much further since then, but if you project forward into the beggar’s nightmare we seem to be descending into – one so prophetically detailed by Rand in the novel – it seems foolish to believe that the inevitable decline wouldn’t degrade things to the point where we too have to revert back to the railroad as the only reliable long distance transportation left.  Her story begins when other more advanced technologies have already been squandered or lost to incompetence.  But Rand was careful to warn that the decline wouldn’t stop there.  It would simply be the tipping point where the loss of the railroad, as the last vestige of a better world, would signal our full plummet into darkness – a darkness symbolized by the loss of all electrical power on the eastern seaboard, at the novel’s end.  If you honestly expected the future laid out by Rand to include anything more futuristic than a rusting railroad, then I respectfully think you’ve sorely missed the whole point.

So many of us have been conditioned to see the dystopian future as highly repressive yet technologically advanced beyond imagination.  It is to the credit of authors like Orwell and Zamyatin that they were able to leave that imprint as a general assumption of the totalitarian future.  But I once read a criticism of this template, from Rand, that technological advancement and innovation requires freedom for an individual to think and experiment, and in a totalitarian state where those are repressed or punished no such advancement is possible.  With this I completely agree and would even point out that this very concept is borne out in reality whenever one looks to the east of us, at the state of North Korea.

In this context, when you really do think about it, who are the silly ones here?  The ones who build a story in the future around a railroad, or the ones who expect a future as painted by Rand to have anything better?

***

And one last thing on P.J. O'Rourke's smarmy comment about John Galt presumably being played by a raincoat...In the book, a shadowy figure in a raincoat was all we saw of Galt until the second of the novel's three parts.  It's part of the suspense.  It's disappointing to see such a shallow toss off from someone who usually engages in more depth.

On ‘violence’ in the UK

And the "principled" smashing of windows...

The term criminal damage is harder to diminish and smashing windows with bricks in a non-violent manner is not an easy thing to do, at least not on the streets of central London. Needless to say, it takes a fair amount of effort to heave larger, heavier objects through someone else’s windows. Just as it takes a certain disposition not to care particularly about where, or on whom, those objects may land along with shards of flying glass. And perhaps we should assume that Laurie has no objection to her belongings being destroyed by those who disagree with her, provided they feel sufficiently righteous and entitled.

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.

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.

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.

And who wants to be the wicked stepmother?

The #1 disadvantage to dating a single dad:  His ex-wife.  Just ask my ex ;)

Judging by the amount of stress, time and money Mikey and I have wasted just trying to manage his, I can't say I blame any of the women who decide a single dad has too much baggage to deal with to be worth dating.  Of course, that's placing myself in the shoes of your average, wussy girl.  I'm not that, so it was never a consideration for me.

But I have warned my eldest son, who has been steadily dating the same nice girl for over 2 years, that he must be very careful who he has children with because bitches are forever.  Getting divorced is bad enough.  Getting divorced with children involved, invariably chains you to a woman who is likely to viciously hate you for the rest of her life -- and may not be able to help herself from using your children as a means to exact punishment and revenge in uniquely cruel and creative ways.

For me though, there is nothing sexier than a really good dad.  He's sensitive and patient, and doesn't mind getting dirty ;)

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.

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.

The new Sherriff wears bunny slippers

So much for America being the world's police force...

My point is that across the depths of Africa--from Egypt in the north to Zimbabwe in the south (and dare I say South Africa itself?) and in Congo and Sudan and a dozen countries besides--the killers and the humiliators are free to kill and humiliate without even a chastising from the United States. So where are the idealists and youthful human rights champions? Nowhere. Darfur was only an issue when they could taunt George Bush about it.

Oh Canada!

Contrast this...

When officers arrived they found Joshua Dexter Watson, 24, of Knoxville dead from multiple wounds administered by a .357-caliber revolver belonging to the homeowners, DeBusk said. . . . Watson has a criminal history that began even before his 18th birthday, records show. He was facing a charge of aggravated robbery in 2004 before he turned 18. After that, Watson racked up dozens of charges, including drug possession, theft, evading arrest, reckless driving and violation of probation for the aggravated robbery conviction, records show.

with this...

Manzer has been charged with possessing a weapon for a purpose dangerous to the public peace after he went out to help a neighbour dealing with three young men who were spotted trespassing in his Burton neighborhood late one night in March.

[..]

Manzer, who took restricted firearms training during his time in the military, said he knows he can't use potentially lethal force to protect property and kept the gun pointed at the ground throughout the brief incident.

"I wasn't out there to take the law into my own hands. I never left my property," said Manzer, who said that between November and March, residents of his small neighbourhood had to contend with break-ins to sheds, thieves rummaging through parked cars and vandalism ranging from damage to Christmas decorations to uprooted fruit trees.

"I yelled at them and said everyone be quiet and I told my wife to call 9-1-1."

He said he watched as his neighbour rounded up three strangers - all of whom looked like adults but turned out to be minors.

With the situation under control, Manzer, shirtless in the minus-13 degree night, went back inside and locked up his gun before hading back out.

He said Mounties arrived on scene 15 minutes later, took the three youths into custody and confiscated a near-empty liquor bottle.

When a Mountie showed up at his door six days later on Good Friday, Manzer assumed they were coming to take a statement.

Instead, he was arrested in front of his wife and kids. Then the Mounties seized his shotgun and hunting rifles.

The neighbour who nabbed the youths was also arrested and told he was being charged with assault.

I know where I'd rather live.

It begins at home

Perhaps if these mothers spent a little more of their time at home, actually doing things with their children -- as opposed to marching to the front lawn of Queen's Park on a Sunday morning -- their kids might have something better to do with their time, than run around the city shooting each other.

I've got a closet filled with board games, my kitchen has been victim to more than several messy cupcake-making extravaganzas and I have spent countless hours dragging our hoard out on every god-forsaken backwoods trail, mossy cliff, sun-drenched beach and packed amusement park known to man.  I drag them out to dig in the garden with me.  I cajole them into eating dinner all together, as a family, every night they are there.  I rent lame movies with inappropriate humor, and make root bear floats and crappy microwave popcorn and force them to watch and laugh with me -- even the older ones who have become too cool for family movie night.  Tough.  Humor me.

This is how you stop your children from joining gangs or selling drugs out of their locker.  This is how you keep them off a street where they'll run into a character they just shouldn't mess with.  The investment you make, as a parent, is time.  Giving them your time shows them they matter to you, and if they matter to you, they will matter more to themselves.  And kids who have a high regard for themselves, their lives and their family, don't get mixed up with the kind of thugs who will shoot them in the face in the hallway at school.  They just don't.

With very rare exceptions, the kind of kids who get shot in this city, are the ones who know or hang around the dudes who do the shooting -- if they're not the shooters themselves.  And if these punks didn't have guns, they'd resort to car bumpers, baseball bats or just good old fashioned fists, to settle disputes.

These mothers need to face the honest truth of that and re-examine their own priorities, before calling on the government (or anyone else for that matter) to parent their children for them.

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.

Hipster

A term which - in my household - must always be accompanied by the suffix douchebag...

Behold the hipster, the stylishly disaffected breed of twentysomethings whose fog of twee whimsy envelops Williamsburg and the East Village. Most who encounter the hipster in its natural habitat respond in one of two ways: derision or ridicule.

But science does not cast judgment. Its goal is to explore and explain dispassionately, whether the object of study be the noble eagle or the lowly nematode. So what does science have to tell us about this fascinatingly misunderstood breed, the indigenous North American hipster?

Alas, not enough to make them cool or interesting.

But it does add an interesting look into the falacy of individualism that infects all so-called rebels...

The deeper irony is that those who try to assert their independence from the commodification of identity wind up tapping into another marketplace myth, what the authors call "the myth of consumer sovereignty." This is the idea that by assiduously selecting from all the identity markers available for purchase, a person can assemble one that authentically reflects their true self independent of the marketplace. Some of the hipsters that Arsel and Thompson talked to are well aware of the futility of this project. Said one, identified as "Tom":

I don't necessarily know every single weird obscure band. I don't necessarily want to. But I mean, yeah, who do I hang out with? I hang out with like a bunch of tattooed indie dorks. So, yeah, I guess I am but I wouldn't self-identify, I think. I'd listen to stuff that's outside the mainstream or it's like I dress weird compared to the majority of the population. I just try not to think about it too much. The minute you start identifying with a subculture... you kind of lose individuality, surrender part of your identity, and we don't wanna do that.

Which can be extended as a rebuttal to all those idiots who dress like gangsters and then complain when people suspect them of being gansters.  You don't wear your pant waist down to your knees because it's comfortable.  You wear it that way because you want your peers to regard you as a badass, not to be messed with.

As a consequence, if the rest of us -- the squares -- also regard you as a badass, but not in the good way, well, wish granted.  Lump it.

Don't even get me started on emos.

Legal Flogging

I'm always amused by the argument that legalizing prostitution will somehow confer "dignity" upon the practice.

Among the many hours I spent writhing around on stage, dripping with sweat and baby oil, "dignity" was never something I considered to be on display at the time.  I can only imagine the contradiction to be worse once the contact becomes more *ahem* intimate.

 

Not dumb, just coddled

I'm not so sure that technology makes kids stupid.  What I do know is that it makes their parents lazy.

Why play a game of Uno or Crokinole with your kids when you can pass them off on the xBox or i-something?

Some of our kids have a live-in nanny at their "other" house and they're never expected to clean up after themselves or even tie their own shoes.  It took me 3 months of nagging to get the youngest to realize it was not my jobto brush her hair for her.  It didn't even occur to her that she could do it for herself.  Teaching them not only to do for themselves, but to know how to, is the most important job we have, as parents.  Too many these days, prefer to let YouTube and reality television shape their children's expectations of life.

I'll tell you...just one pink sock in the wrong load of laundry, and my 16-year-old son insists on doing all his own clothes ;)  A couple missed transfers and he figured out how to read a transit map and schedule.  He already helps me change the brakes on the car and he's been using the vacuum for years.

All this, and he can still fix my computer for me.

That's the difference between treating the iPod as an occasional distraction, and using it as a substitute for actually parenting your children.

Why are we even talking about this?

I strongly suspect the furor is the whole point.

Our reaction makes that point far more eloquently than any bonfire could ever do.  The bad guys are taking notes and you can be sure they don't include brownie points for cultural sensitivity.

Maybe the judgment the pastor is looking for is not on them, but on us.

*****

Christianity has its fair share of kooks who use offensive stunts and fiery rhetoric to get attention and extend the reach of their message, but they truly are the fringe of the faith.  That’s why people like Fred Phelps and Terry Jones can only muster crowds the size of a regional Bridge club.

One look at Islam tells us, as far as furtherance of the faith and public image goes, the fringe are the ones truly in charge.  Pick any prominent Muslim leader and quotes can be attributed to him expounding on the virtues of child marriage, giving parameters on the proper ritual for sex with goats, and calling for the righteously violent slaughter of just about everyone else.  And they’re not just talking about it, but making it happen whenever they get the chance.

From “uncovered catmeat” Hilali, to Abu Hamza, Mullah Omar, Ayatollah Khomeini or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, none of these are marginalized fringe characters.  They are all prominent, influential figureheads of a faith which holds violent oppression and submission to god as its primary tenets.

I challenge anybody to find me Islam’s Billy Graham.  There simply isn’t one and if there were, he would either be leading prayers at a mosque in goat-hump nowhere, or in an Iranian prison.

Islam is a world-wide Jonestown phenomenon.  The radical element is the faith and your average “moderate Muslim” has more in common with the Kool-Aid guzzling kooks than with any typical Catholic or Protestant quilt-maker.

Dispensing with the delusional caveat that the radicals in Islam are just the fringe would be our first major victory in this war.  Right now, it’s the ground on which we teeter, on the verge of the abyss.

Cultural Silos

This should outrage you just as much as this does.

The love that dare not speak its name

Memo to rainbow progressive types who insist on discussing AIDS like it's equivalent to the common cold -- that anybody can catch it...

The HIV pandemic has historically been thought of as either concentrated in specific populations—such as gay men, injection drug–users, sex workers—or generalized across the entire population in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean. But as more and better epidemiological data has become available, the evidence is clear: men who have sex with men (MSM), regardless of whether or not they identify as gay, also are at the core of those generalized epidemics.

MSM in developing countries are 19 times more likely to be infected with HIV than the general population, according to a 2007 literature review.

Even in Africa, at the heart of the pandemic, in Malawi, 21 percent of MSM are infected with the virus compared with 11 percent of the general population, whereas Zambia's rates are 33 percent versus 15 percent, respectively, says Chris Beyrer, director of the Johns Hopkins Center of Public Health and Human Rights.

"The argument that gay and bisexual men are a trivial sideshow in the global fight against AIDS is wrong,"

And this whole time, we've been told it's bigotry and homophobia to even suggest such a thing!

Homeroom: Homicide

What do you have to do, to get fired from the education system in Australia?

WESTERN Australia's Education Department chief has apologised after a high school teacher set students an assignment to plan a terrorist attack to kill innocent people.

The society and environment teacher at the Kalgoorlie-Boulder Community High School asked Year 10 students to pretend they were a terrorist planning a chemical or biological attack on ''an unsuspecting Australian community''.

``Your goal is to kill the MOST innocent civilians in order to get your message across,'' the assignment read.

The students had to explain their choice of victims and decide the best time and place to release their weapon.

The assignment was withdrawn and the teacher counselled following a complaint made to the school after one 15-year-old student refused to do it, saying she was horrified and disgusted.

Education Department Director-General Sharyn O'Neill on Wednesday said the teacher had exercised ``poor judgement'' and was remorseful.

She said the teacher, who has been teaching for three years, was ``well intentioned'' and her heart was ``in it for the kids''.

Ms O'Neill said her ``deepest sympathy'' was with families of victims of terrorism who may have been offended by the assignment.

One is left to wonder how the school board would have reacted if a student had chosen to complete the assignment with a detailed outline involving a school bombing and/or the use of a variety of automatic weapons.  Would it also be passed off as just "poor judgment", I wonder?

Two words:

Home School...

An academically gifted 10-year-old from Ontario will have to repeat some grade levels — because he's too young for high school.

Windsor resident Bachar Sbeiti said he's growing depressed that the public school board won't let him enrol in Grade 9 this fall despite his completion of the Grade 8 curriculum through private school.

It makes me feel bad," said the boy. "The city, I believe, should encourage people to go higher and be smarter."

But Sharon Pyke, a superintendent of education with the Greater Essex County District School Board, said a child of Bachar's age belongs in Grade 5 — at the most, Grade 6.

"Our belief is that we do not accelerate students," Pyke said. "We recognize that students work really well with their peers, and want to be with their peers.

"He's coming from a different system. He would be placed in his age-appropriate grade."

Right Jay?