Barrel Strength

Hitler is informed of Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts:

Now that the French are accusing US of “occupying” Haiti, one must ask the inevitable question – where exactly is the oil in Haiti?  Wasn’t this the sort of “cowboy” foreign policy suppose to have ended with the cowboy presidency of Bush Jr.?  And wasn’t Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize an acknowledgment of that fact?

All the conceits of enviro-’watermelons’ and the simply awful United Church of Canada come together in one package:

Mardi Tindal, the newly elected moderator of the United Church of Canada, returned from last month’s climate change summit in Copenhagen with a deep malaise. Not a true clinical depression, but an anxious despair that reduced her to weeping.

[...]

“And I said, ‘Doug, I’m weeping for the millions of lives that have been lost as a result of what did and did not happen in Copenhagen,” Ms. Tindal said. “My experience was that I had a place to go with my tears and my lament … It’s an expression of pain for the world’s suffering.”

Climb down, madam, that cross isn’t a two-seater model!

I admit that I have lived a long time, and yet it seems like nothing until I talk to younger people, who do not remember a time before the Internet.

Recently I saw a photograph I took of my two eldest children, as teenagers, beside my then living parents. The season was March, the day sunny, everyone in sweaters but no coats or hats, and the field behind them still covered in snow, which might have lasted another week. It was 1995. My father, still black-haired at 83, was to live until 2000, five years later. He would be healthy for another two years, until a gentle decline. My mother is still alive, somewhat frailer than in the picture, but mentally still sharp at 91.

It struck me that that photo was 15 years old! I would have been 45 years old when I took it. Forty five is full middle age.  Wait! The realization how old I am only gets  worse.

I recently spoke to a group of 22 year-olds in fourth year university. It means the average person in that class was born in the last year of Reagan. Their infancy was in the regime of George Herbert Walker Bush, their childhood under Bill Clinton, their teen-age under George W. Bush the Younger.

These young people do not remember the Cuban Missile Crisis or the fall of Communism any more than we remember the coronation of George VI, which my mother remembers well, she then in her 18th year, passing down sandwiches to the equally young Bud Drury, later Pierre Trudeau’s minister for everything,  from her hotel window in London before the parade was to pass by.

I suppose if we had the privilege of asking our forebears, some would have remembered Armistice Day in 1918, and others would have remembered bells ringing to mark Trafalgar in 1805, and Waterloo ten years later.  Or the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, which solidified the claim of Protestants to the throne of England.  Or how Bach the elder used to forget his frustrations with the Lepizig town council by going into the organ loft at Thomaskirche to improvize for hours on the organ, and communicate as directlyas a man can with God. Or what Akhnaton said to his priests when he established worship of the one true Sun-God against the polytheism of Egypt. Or how one of our forefathers worked out the bow and arrow, or one of our foremothers who first brewed beer. God bless you, madam!

The next miracle, if you will forgive the word, is how my contemporaries are so much younger than 60-year-olds in my parents’ day. Sure, there were healthy looking parents at sixty and well-preserved people at seventy forty years ago in the year 1970, but they were exceptional. 

If it were not for the face in the mirror, I would not know I was getting older, and even now I suspect some Dorian Gray portrait may exist somewhere, doing the ageing for me, because I feel great!

As in the Academy awards, my thanks to the following list of people and forces:

• my parents, or giving birth to me
• the healthsystem, for dealing with my ailments, few though they be
• for the victors of World War II, for making the world safe for liberal democracy
• for the Cold Warriors, for keeping Communism contained
• for my guardian angel, for looking out for me
• for my children, for confirming me in my life’s choices
• for those who have loved me, for upholding me
• to the Creator of this Universe, for giving us all a place to live
• to my Saviour, for keeping me in mind.

Thanks to you all! I could not have done it without you! Thank you!

Real men iron their shirts. At least I like to think so. 

Ironing has many advantages.

The activity is mindless in the zen sense, a series of repetitive actions of flattening fabric with the hands and passing the iron over it to bring perfection to wrinkled matter. Like ritual of any kind, the activity misleads the mind strategically, so that the mind thinks that it is busy doing something while it empties itself. It is a whole lot easier than sitting in a chair contemplating one’s thought processes. It involves less social self-presentation than church. It involves less risk from inattention than driving. It is far less expensive than fly-fishing, being able to be conducted in your basement with a minimum of equipment.  It conduces to large amounts of spousal approval, while permitting serious listening to one’s favourite music. 

As I ironed my wife’s blouses, I considered the fact that the buttons of women’s shirts run down the left side rather than the right. I speculated whether some bored housewife in the late 1950s used this same fact to argue that the differences between men and women were merely conventional, like the placement of buttons on a shirt. It would have marked the humble orign of one of the world’s stupidest and most damaging ideas, that has trampled through society like King Kong in a rage.

A friend of mine who went to university after me, in the 1980s, said that there were two large unquestionable ideas reigning in his day: 1) Reagan was stupid and capitalism was evil and 2) the differences between men and women were merely conventional. You will recall in the seventies and eighties  that mothers gave their boys girls’ toys and their girls’ Tonka trucks, in the attempt to demasculinize the male and masculinize the female, though they did not use those terms. There was also the doctor who used some poor boy who had lost his penis in a medical accident. The boy, used as the poster child for the notion that a genetic male could be raised as a female, subsequently resumed his male identity, got reconstructive surgery and married. There were many attempts of a similar nature to eradicate male-female differences.

How come these experiments, when conducted by social engineers, are never labelled ideological? When parents  support spanking children , they are being “ideological”. When parents oppose spanking children, they are called “progressive”? A recent study from social researchers at Calvin college supported the benefits of spanking between the ages of two and six for the later development of responsible adults. I do not know whether any such study can prove anything useful, but I did remark that the Usual Suspects sniffed that the Christian origin of Calvin college maight have induced a bias into the experimental method. As if the leftist assault on society by Horkheimer, Adorno and their successors and imitators proceeded from some Burkean satisfaction with hierarchical social arrangements.

There was always an  ambiguity in the argument too, of the socially constructed view of  male-female differences. They could never quite get it clear whether the differences were socially constructed, or whether the male was, in essence, just violent and evil. We men were all supposed to wear the red ribbons of shame for twenty five years because some abused Algerian boy, Gamil Gharbi, renamed Marc Lepine, killed the fourteen women engineering students at the Universite de Montreal. Even in 2010 it takes a brave newspaper to publish an article suggesting this tragedy might have been about Islamic male contempt for women than reflective of a general male hostility to female success.

This might be a cheaper way to get high for the NASA astronauts.

A bag of cocaine has been found in a Space Shuttle hangar – sparking a Nasa investigation.

US space chiefs fear an employee was seeking a different kind of out-of-this-world experience in the restricted area at Kennedy Space Centre, Florida.

No details yet if the Commander-in-Chief lost his stash.

Amid the terrible news of earthquake in Haiti and the world-historical confrontation between Google and China over the unity of the Internet, comes this news: the male Y chrmosome keeps reinventing itself.

The Whitehead Institute, in Cambridge, across the river from Boston, published this today in Nature
The study compared the Y chromosomes in chimpanzees and man, to discover that the rate of change in humans was phenomenal.

Quoting from Nature:

“As the earlier studies had suggested, many of the stark changes between the chimp and human Y chromosomes are due to gene loss in the chimp and gene gain in the human. Page’s team found that the chimp Y chromosome has only two-thirds as many distinct genes or gene families as the human Y chromosome and only 47% as many protein-coding elements as humans. The remainder of the chimp and human genomes are thought to differ in gene number by less than 1%.

“Even more striking than the gene loss is the rearrangement of large portions of the chromosome. More than 30% of the chimp Y chromosome lacks an alignable counterpart on the human Y chromosome, and vice versa, whereas this is true for less than 2% of the remainder of the genome.”

All this reinforces how different we are from chmps as a species, but how much more different we are becoming over time. It also reverses the previous notion that the Y chromosome was residual or of declining importance. As we male chauvinists expect, it is the source of most of the change in the human species. Take that, Andrea Dworkin!

[Note: The genome sequencing comparison between men and women, and chimps of either sex, has yet to be conducted. So my headline is yet unproven.]

 Test: Which of the three items just mentioned: the disaster in Haiti, the unity of the Internet, or the rapid evolution of the Y chromosome, do you consider most important? Discuss.

Watch Robert Gibbs as he skates through a non-answer to a real question.  Maybe it’s just me, but his expression and body language seem to say that he knows he is speaking nonsense.  But then it is interesting to see some other White House correspondents start to gang up on him a little. While I wouldn’t read a lot into that, it might indicate that climate change is less of a religious issue.  Except at the Globe, where the author of a heretical despatch is despatched.

Washington Examiner finds a gem buried in a blog post by Newsweek’s reporter Michael Isikoff, in relation to a proposed move of detainees from Guantanamo to a new prison in Obama’s home state of Illinois.

But the final irony is that many of the detainees may not even want to be transferred to Thomson and could conceivably even raise their own legal roadblocks to allow them to stay at Gitmo.

Falkoff notes that many of his clients, while they clearly want to go home, are at least being held under Geneva Convention conditions in Guantánamo. At Thomson, he notes, the plans call for them to be thrown into the equivalent of a “supermax” security prison under near-lockdown conditions.

“As far as our clients are concerned, it’s probably preferable for them to remain at Guantánamo,” he says.

That is not the first time that the detainees at Gitmo have basked in tropical comforts.  A Slate report in 2003 noted this.

Is America the only country in the world that could run a prison camp where prisoners gain weight? Between April 2002 and March 2003, the Joint Task Force returned to Afghanistan 19 of the approximately 664 men (from 42 countries) who have been held in the detention camps at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay. Upon leaving, it has been reported, each man received two parting gifts: a brand new copy of the Koran as well as a new pair of jeans. Not the act of generosity that it might first appear, the jeans, at least, turned out to be a necessity. During their stay (14-months on average), the detainees (nearly all of them) had gained an average of 13 pounds.

A 2006 ABC report noticed the same.

Fueled by a high-calorie diet, detainees at Guantanamo Bay are becoming fat.

Most of the prisoners arrived at the military prison in southeast Cuba slightly underweight but have since gained an average of 20 pounds (9 kilograms), and most are now “normal to mildly overweight or mildly obese,” Navy Cmdr. Robert Durand, spokesman for the detention facilities, said Monday.

One detainee’s weight has almost doubled to 410 pounds (186 kilograms), Durand said.

http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/news/broadcasters/bbc-trust-to-investigate-science-coverage/5009412.article

It cannot be long now before the trials begin.

BBC Trust to investigate science coverage

6 January, 2010 | By Jasmine Phillips

It starts with an Australian farmer, Peter Spencer, who is starving himself to death because the greenie government stole his land.  This could go global. So simple and so real.  The Tea Party movement in the US has made great strides, but its Amnerican branding localizes and restricts it. But everybody hates red tape because it means big government everywhere.

“James in Tasmania has had a great idea to support Peter Spencer. He took something known as “flagging tape”, added a scarecrow, and a slow moving sheep and created this message for the world to see.”
The Red Tape Protest has started « JoNova (7 January 2010)

http://snipurl.com/tzr9i

The Gaia-worshipping clique behind the false god of climate change now brand non-comformity to their doctrines as the product of religious reactionaries:

So it comes as no surprise to hear a female pastoralist from the arid lands of North-East Kenya decrying the combined wisdom of the world’s scientists, after being told that climate change is man-made.

“How can man change the climate and make it stop raining: it is God’s will that has brought the drought,” she utters.

[...]

The “God not man” cry from the lady in Kenya’s northern reaches illustrates a common problem relating to understanding the underlying causes, and underscores the incapability of people in such situations to deal with the crisis that has impacted so severely on their communities.

Silly Kenyans, if only they could see the proper way:

The primary belief of this religion is that life in this universe is a mistake which must be corrected.

In a recent advice column the issue concerned the tolerance of the housewife for her husband’s Playboys in the living room for the children to see. You can guess the tut-tutting from those guardians of morality.  The readers were warned that dad’s Playboys might give the girls the false idea that their body image and their ability to satisfy a man sexually were of primary importance.

Well, actually…. they are. And anyone who denies it is in rampant denial fo the facts. The ability of the woman to satisfy a man sexually is absolutely primary. It is job #1. Sometimes it is the less immediate concern, such as when mum and dad are shopping for groceries, reading stories to the kids or cooking dinner. Work can interfere too. But over the long haul – especially if there is going to be a long haul – satisfying your man sexually is the job. Because if that is working out, everything else is working out.  Sex life is the measure of the relationship.

And if you disagree with me, please go live somewhere else, preferably in a convent.

Please, spare us the anti-scare “attacker’ quotes and show your true colours by describing Kurt Westergard’s unsuccessful assassin as merely an “unscheduled visitor with anger management issues”.

The only upside BBC editors can expect from their shameful behaviour is that the jihadis will slit their throats last.

2009 has been considered a bad year for many; for me it was a year of triumphs. The forces of evil have been turned back internationally and domestically on two decisive fronts: free speech, vigorous nationalism, and climate change.

Free speech

The campaign waged by Ezra Levant in Canada against the speech control fanatics at Human Rights Commissions has been successful. The blogosphere rose in defence of Ezra but he made it work, by patiently devoting himself to de-legitiizing them. Later, the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench joined in the de-legitimization by roundly castigating the idiotic decision of Lori Andreachuk, the Alberta Human Rights Commissioner in the Stephen Boisson case.

Vigorous Nationalism

The nationalist cultural policy first came to light in the Herouxville Declaration, a statement made in 2007 by a small Quebec town’s aldermen and mayor that this is a Christian country, we eat pigs and we don’t treat our women like slaves. If you read it, you will find it surprizingly liberal in tone, but it appeared at a time when it was considered dangerous and provocative to herald Canadian social values, so uptight had everyone become with Muslim cultural intimidation.

Read the rest…