Ah! Quebec’s specificity! or how the rules do not apply to us

In the Devoir on Friday, Frederic Bastien, a professor of history at Dawson College (the English language CEGEP, of all things!) published the strongest possible confirmation of the Quebec intelligentsia’s bad faith in regard to human rights, whenever these conflict with the Québecois attitudes to differences. Bastien is author of La Bataille de Londres, which alleges foul play by the Supreme Court of Canada in the patriation of the constitution.

Though the intolerance comes as no surprise, it is always slightly shocking, after all these years, to find how solid, un-selfconscious, and self-pitying the arguments are for Quebec authorities to act as bullies.

Bastien argues:

D’abord, le public ne comprend pas qu’on puisse permettre à un joueur de faire du prosélytisme religieux durant un match de sport. Le fait de porter un turban n’est pas banal. Bien plus qu’un bout de tissu, ce symbole religieux est un condensé de vérité. Il évoque une vision du monde partagée par un groupe. Ce geste ostentatoire est incompatible avec l’esprit collectif qui doit être celui d’une équipe de soccer évoluant dans une ligue.

A rough translation would be:

First of all, the public does not understand how one can permit a player to engage in religious proselytism in a sporting match. The fact of wearing a turban is not trivial. More than a piece of cloth, it is an emblem of truth. It evokes a vision of world shared by a group. This ostentatious gesture is incompatible with with the collective spirit which must animate a team playing in a league.”

In contrast to Quebec’s view that state should be laic and the public space neutral towards religions, the official religion in Canada under the charter of rights is multiculturalism, says Bastien:

Le multiculturalisme s’est aussi imposé grâce aux décisions des tribunaux. Ceux-ci ont utilisé la charte à cette fin car elle protège le droit de vivre au Canada tout en agissant comme si on était toujours dans son pays d’origine.

Cette approche a toujours eu comme finalité de banaliser le statut du Québec comme peuple fondateur….

Multiculturalism was also imposed by the decisions of courts. These used the Charter for this purpose, because the Charter protects the right to live in Canada even as people act as if they were still in their country of origin.

This approach has always been intended to trivialize the role of the Quebec as a founding people.

And further:

Tel est certainement l’aspect le plus tordu de ce débat. Pendant de longues et nombreuses décennies, les Canadiens anglais ont fait preuve de sectarisme et de discrimination envers les Canadiens français, quand ils ne tentaient pas carrément de nous assimiler. Aujourd’hui, ils se drapent d’une fausse tolérance dans le but précis de nous attribuer ce rôle d’oppresseur. En réalité, nos compatriotes recyclent la même vieille intolérance dont la majorité d’entre eux a souvent fait preuve à notre endroit.

Such is certainly the most twisted aspect of this debate. For many long and numerous decades, English Canadians have demonstrated sectarianism and discrimination towards French Canadians., when they were not trying to assimilate us. Today, they cloak themselves in a false tolerance for the purpose of attributing to us the role of oppressor. In reality, our compatriots are recycling the same old intolerance of which the majority among them have often demonstrated towards us.

We are here in the full presence of bullies caught bullying and trying the same old cry of “you are being mean to us”. The instincts of the Quebecois are collectivist. As Francis Parkman, the great American historian of the ancien regime in New France once stated, the goal was “conformity in society, uniformity in religion, and exclusion in economics”. The goals of Quebec have not changed in the least since the days of Louis XIV. The attitudes are: there ought to be one kind of steeple in the town, teaching one orthodox doctrine. Diversity is weakness, argument is divisive, we must be unified and strong to deal with our enemies, who happen to be everyone who is not us.

Professor Bastien, after four centuries of French Canada dwelling in our midst, do you really think we do not know who you are? Do you still think we are fundamentally mistaken about you? None of us are born bigots, Professor Bastien. We get that way after decades of experiencing Quebec’s Afrikaner-style intolerance for outsiders. We are not going to back off any longer calling you bullies when you act as such.

Gibbon was right about the NSA wiretapping

June 10, 2013, From a Pew Research poll.

A majority of Americans – 56% – say the National Security Agency’s (NSA) program tracking the telephone records of millions of Americans is an acceptable way for the government to investigate terrorism, though a substantial minority – 41% – say it is unacceptable. And while the public is more evenly divided over the government’s monitoring of email and other online activities to prevent possible terrorism, these views are largely unchanged since 2002, shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

1781, Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

A people who still remembered that their ancestors had been the masters of the world would have applauded, with conscious pride, the representation of ancient freedom, if they had not long since been accustomed to prefer the solid assurance of bread to the unsubstantial visions of liberty and greatness.

Crush dissent!

There is a great article on how a lonely band of isolated climate skeptics (anti-catastrophists, show-me-the-evidence types) have succeeded in largely derailing the massive warmist- catastrophist wave of propaganda. The thrust of the article is that the catastrophists could not leave alone the people who expressed any doubt whatever about man-caused global warming. The thought of dissent anywhere was intolerable, and so a bunch of otherwise unknown people were raised to prominence by their enemies.

With my acknowledgment to the New Yorker magazine, the following is apt.

Things I do not understand

1. Elvis Presley: I never got him. I still do not understand why the greasy drug-addicted hillbilly had the effect he did. What about Carl Perkins? Why of all the rockabilly musicians emerging in the 1950s was Presley singled out for world adulation?

2. Tattoos: Are vulgar signs of abandonment of the ideal of the body beautiful for the body distorted. They are ugly. They make one look uglier the older one gets. They indicate a propensity for hepatitis C, which was once virtually unknown outside the South Pacific Islands, and is now spreading with tattoo needles, among other needle-driven disease vectors.

3. Photographing your wife having sex with black men: I would not lend out my wife to anyone I would not trust with my chain saw, my rifle, or my wallet. In fact I do not think I would lend her out at all, both as she is not really mine to lend and because I might not like the results if I did. Yet there seems to be a genre of home-made pornography that seems to involve wives being pictured penetrated by one or more black men, and there seems to be no lack of participants in this craze. Apart from the vulgarity of posting photographs of the commission of group sex to the Internet, which is quite understandable in the conditions of life these days, and the possible embarrassment years later when she runs for alderman, school trustee, or member of parliament, the whole idea of letting one’s wife be fucked by others while the husband photographs the event is detumescifying, to find a polite term. Call me a prude. I do not mind healthy people having sex. I do not mind people taking pix of same. I do not object to putting sexual stuff on the Internet, really. But I am mystified by this particular fetish. My objection is not merely to the portrayal of it, it is to the weirdness of the act itself. Sexual tastes are beyond rational comprehension, aren’t they? Forgive me, readers, next thing you know I will be quoting Malcolm Muggeridge.After this reactionary outburst, I will sign myself in for anti-racist programming from a nearby human rights commission. But I still don’t get it.

Bracing for ecnomic volatility

The economic volatility is downstream from financial volatility and the latter process might have started during the last week of May. The extent of government intervention in the markets, via Quantitative Easing (QE), is unprecedented and therefore the ramifications will have a lot of unknowns.

What I think gets lost in the discussion about the cost/benefit of QE, and more importantly, how long it has gone on, is the fact that there are billions of potentially very volatile long duration low coupons on the balance sheets of investment portfolios. Bond math dictates that for a given duration, the lower the coupon, the more volatile the price. A 2% 10-year is much more price-sensitive than a 4% 10-year. Due to the nature of these low, long duration coupons, the adjustment process is likely to be very chaotic, making last week look like a game of tiddlywinks. This is bound to have a profound impact on portfolios and on sentiment….

The dark side of QE is the idea that no one really knows where the natural rate of interest really is, and finding that equilibrium is going to be a very uncomfortable adjustment process. Regardless to what extent you believe the Fed has influenced interest rates, the fact is we still don’t know where the curve should trade absent QE.

Iraq and war-for-oil argument

Hopefully this will put an end to the oft repeated leftist canard that the Iraq war was for oil.

Since the American-led invasion of 2003, Iraq has become one of the world’s top oil producers, and China is now its biggest customer.

China already buys nearly half the oil that Iraq produces, nearly 1.5 million barrels a day, and is angling for an even bigger share, bidding for a stake now owned by Exxon Mobil in one of Iraq’s largest oil fields.

“The Chinese are the biggest beneficiary of this post-Saddam oil boom in Iraq,” said Denise Natali, a Middle East expert at the National Defense University in Washington. “They need energy, and they want to get into the market.”

Why do leftist keep repeating the remark that one must go to war to secure oil? Perhaps they do not understand fundamental economics. In case of the oil market there is a very willing seller, the Arab countries don’t have much else to trade and need the money, and willing buyers. To purchase the oil, one simply has to pay for it and outbid the other buyers, which is what the Chinese are doing.

Distinguishing between moderate and radical Islam

One always hears from the Muslim apologist, that one has to differentiate between Muslim and Islam. Presumably this similar to the task of identifying the differences between say, Marxist-Leninist, Trotskyite, Maoist etc. But what do you do you when mainstream Muslims are like this? Kindly note that this a preacher who is a regular guest on TV shows in his country.

A Saudi preacher who raped his five-year-old daughter and tortured her to death has been sentenced to pay “blood money” to the mother after having served a short jail term, activists said on Saturday.

Lama Al Ghamdi was admitted to hospital on December 25, 2011 with multiple injuries, including a crushed skull, broken ribs and left arm, extensive bruising and burns, the activists said. She died last October 22.

Fayhan Al Gamdi, an Islamic preacher and regular guest on Muslim television networks, confessed to having used cables and a cane to inflict the injuries, the activists from the group “Women to Drive” said in a statement.

They said the father had doubted Lama’s virginity and had her checked up by a medic.

Randa Al Kaleeb, a social worker from the hospital where Lama was admitted, said the girl’s back was broken and that she had been raped “everywhere”, according to the group.

According to the victim’s mother, hospital staff told her that her “child’s rectum had been torn open and the abuser had attempted to burn it closed.”

Let us understand some facts here. Is a 5-year old really culpable for losing her virginity? Is the proper recourse to rape her “everywhere” and then try to seal a rectum, that had been torn open, by burning it close?

And to think that a 2004 report in Ontario recommended that Sharia be implemented in the province. At least McGuinty did one thing right by rejecting the recommendation.

Holder and Islamic terrorism

The upcoming trial of Ft. Hood terrorist should be a teachable moment for Eric Holder who earlier stated this.

Attorney General Eric Holder hesitated to answer whether radical Islam was even a motivating factor for the individuals responsible for the Fort Hood shooting, the attempted Christmas Day bombing and the attempted Times Square attack.

“There are a variety of reasons why I think people have taken these actions,” Holder told the House Judiciary Committee. “One, I think just look at each individual case. We are in the process how of talking to Mr. (Faisal) Shahzad to try to understand what it is that drove him to take the action.”

Now that Nidal Hasan has been given the opportunity to represent himself things should get interesting.

Nidal Hasan can represent himself at trial, raising specter of jihadist rants

The judge in the Nidal Hasan murder trial ruled Monday that he can represent himself at trial. Hasan’s only motivation is likely a desire to use the trial as an ideological platform, legal experts say.

In his court statement today he stated the following.

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people, told a judge on Tuesday that he believed he was defending the lives of the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan from American military personnel when he went on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood here in November 2009.

All this while Holder and Obama were trying to convince us that this was a simple case of “workplace violence”.

Two ends of the social assistance spectrum

Are these two so different because of culture, race or something else?

Maritha Nelson, illegal immigrant in US from Mexico

Fox News reports Maritha Nelson’s $240 in food stamps has run out, leaving her $9 in cash and seven people to feed. The 50-year-old single mother, who entered the U.S. by swimming across the Rio Grande, has government funded housing, medication, and $700 a month in Social Security. She’s been on assistance for 20 years, and wants others to know that help is available.

Michael Cole, British citizen in UK

An unemployed man stabbed to death his wife of 32 years because he felt their life on benefits was meaningless and they had nothing to do other than watch television.

Michael Cole, 56, was overcome by “chronic feelings of hopelessness” and directed his anger towards Susan, 53, Exeter Crown Court heard.

The couple, who had no children, had both lost their jobs and and faced the prospect of having their home being repossessed when their savings ran out.

Cole had tried to convince his wife to make a suicide pact but she refused.

He killed her with a hammer and knife and remained with her body at their home in Torquay for two days before calling the police on March 13 to confess.

Cole then tried to take his own life but survived.

Jihadism is an app

Best description of the phenomenon: distributed, downloadable, free. From the Telegraph, by Mathew d’Ancona:

Jihadism is now, literally, an app, a downloadable mindset that encourages self-starting, DIY terrorism of the most basic sort. Roshonara Choudhry, who stabbed the Labour MP, Stephen Timms, in his surgery in May 2010, had been radicalised by jihadi sermons on the web. To say that Islamist terrorism in 2013 is disaggregated is no more meaningful than saying that Nike or Apple is disaggregated. Globalisation has fostered the emergence of a supranational network, connected by hatred of American and Western “foreign policy”, anti-Semitism and a longing to enforce Sharia and restore the Caliphate. As I have written before, the network plots globally and kills locally. It is active in Mali, Algeria, Yemen, Egypt and anywhere else that has Wi-Fi. And last Wednesday it was active in Woolwich.

Jihad, coming to a theatre near you. Why are we importing these people?

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