The delightfully inarticulate law students over at Law is Cool have had twenty or so comments on one of their posts defending the right of the Muslim students to take Mark Steyn and Mcleans Magazine before the Canadian Human Rights Commission.
Apparently these are the ESL law students as no one who actually speaks English could write this chiller of a sentence:
“Part of Steyn’s expressed tactics include spamming government officials, media, and other figures. They have done the same here.”
And, I assume, they will also be taking that remedial internet course: spam has a fairly precise meaning. What our wannabe legal beagles might be talking about is trolling (which I usually find actually cashes out as a way of slagging someone whose arguments you cannot refute) or astroturfing.
However, the law students, being deeply committed to the values of free speech, have cut off comments on all Steyn related posts. Brave! Stouthearted…just the sort of people you’d want fighting your corner in a divorce action or a Charter case.
I must admit I have always thought of Tucker Carlson as the ugly face of bright young thing conservatism and I think of Ron Paul as somehow aligned with the nitwits in Troother land and The New Republic as essentially engaged in making stuff up.
An elementary school in Ottawa was flooded with hateful and threatening e-mails and phone calls after media reports that it had removed the word “Christmas” from a song to be performed at its Christmas concert.
The choir at Elmdale Public School did not sing its controversial version of the song Silver Bells at its closed-door concert Thursday after receiving dozens of angry reponses, including some containing foul language.
Lynn Scott, chair of the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, said some callers accused the school of being anti-Christian and some threatened teachers and officials at the school.
“It’s appalling to me that people could be so intolerant and disrespectful and hateful at a time of the year like this when we’re supposed to be thinking about generosity and peace and good will,” she said. “I’m not seeing very many Christian values in the reaction we’ve had.”
Teachers had originally intended to replace “Christmas time” and other Christmas references from the song’s original 1951 lyrics with words referring to “a festive time.” cbc
And pray why was there a need to replace a perfectly good lyric with a PC lyric?
“intolerant and disrespectful and hateful at a time of the year like this”. Honey, this is not the emailers’ problem, it is your problem for being stupid, provocative and tone deaf at this very time of year.
Of course this is anti-Christian in the sense that Christmas is a profoundly Christian holiday. Deleting all references to it in a “Christmas concert” quite rightly outrages people. As for Christian values - they only go so far and when PC driven secularists take it upon themselves to take the Christmas out of “Festive Time” it is well past time to go Crusader on the dolts who come up with this sort of loonieness.
And people wonder why I homeschool.
Update: I wonder if a complaint to the HRCC might lie in this matter. Personally, as a Christian - albeit of the Anglican sort - I feel demeaned. Hurt. Offended. Hmmmm.
Well they are up until you run out of money and your kids don’t have anything to eat. I’ve been close to that and I know people who have been in exactly that position. The abstraction which is the essence of efficiency arguments does a very bad job of putting food into the kids’ tummies.
Kay and Selick are absolutely correct in their accounting of the double costs of food banks, what they miss is that most of the people who use food banks don’t have a lot of options. It is not as if, as the end of the month rolls round and the cupboard is bare, they can trot down to the “loans for poor people” office and pick up $50.00. (Though Money Mart - aka The Bank of the Damned (ht KMG) does a land office business in payday loans to the working poor.)
The conventional answer of “get a job” is not going to cut it at noon when the kids have has the last eggs in the house for lunch.
Now, all of this can be put down to poor planning, lifestyle choices, bad budgeting and general idiocy; however, those are things which the hungry kids have no control over. What they want is dinner.
I have long maintained that the biggest problem poor people face is the lack of cash. It seems incredibly trite to say that, but being poor is incredibly expensive. The things people who have money take for granted - the trip to the drugstore to fill a prescription, running out for a few things, taking the bus - become a matter for painful calculation when you are poor. Sometimes people get those calculations wrong.
Well, on the one hand large numbers of the undeserving would have to find other ways of filling their bellies. But there would be lots of people who would simply go hungry. As would their kids.
Now Kay suggests that greater efficiency would be achieved by tossing a couple of dollars into a can. “the same amount of social good could have been done by me throwing a dollar or two into a can as a cash donation.” I am not so sure. If there was, somehow, a magic, frictionless, way of speeding that twoonie into the wallet of a struggling family or an old man too proud to beg then, yes, Kay would have a point. But there isn’t.
In fact, the amount of social good created by a donation in kind rather than cash, may be quite significant notwithstanding the transaction costs, or, indeed, because of them. A cash gift looks an awful like a voluntary impersonal tax, a donation in kind can be quite personal.
For example - from time to time I have a spare dollar or two when shopping and I buy small jars of really good baby food. The same stuff Sam and Max were raised on. Call it a buck a jar or, in some stores, 5 for 4. I buy baby food because I am reasonably sure it will go to my intended beneficiary - a small child. I buy good babyfood because it sends a message to the family that at least one person thinks they are certainly worth the extra dime a bottle. So the social good begins to pile up. But, remember that social and economic goods are not divorced from each other. That $4.00 does indeed cover the overheads of the store I make my purchase at and, quite directly, keeps people in work. (The same $4.00 in a cash donation might keep a social worker busy but that is about it.)
Now, at the food bank end my goods are sorted and placed on shelves or in baskets. The people who do this are almost always poor people trying to make the transition back into the workforce or volunteers. My jars keep them busy. From that business the can arise a sense of connection and connectedness. More social good. Cash, on the other hand, would simply go out in a cheque.
Economics tells a fair bit of most stories however the logic of economics works best with money rather than social capital. Some of the most fundamental issues we face as a society - homelessness, drug addiction, falling birth rates, mental illness - might be susceptible to economic analysis; but they are more likely to reward an analysis which considers social capital formation along with purely economic efficiencies.
Put another way, one of the main reasons why food banks exist is that there are individuals and families who have very little money and very few social connections - no social capital at all. They literally have no one to turn to, not even family, if they are out of money and out of food.
Reconnecting poor people to the economic world can be hard, reconnecting them to the social world in which they can accumulate social capital in the form of friends, neighbours, churches, groups and the day to day structures of everyday life is hard in another way. Cash is not going to create any social nexus at all. Some jars of baby food might.
I was surfing and went to my friend Edward Micheal George’s blog wherein I discovered:
Oh, and on his web site, he still promotes links to a loser who writes articles about “the kosher tax,” and another one who says “F**k The Jews.” And one who says he is a bigot. [eds. note, That would be me.]And, naturally, the Small-Brained Animal, who defends Nazis. the liar warren kinsella via emg
I keep hoping that the little twat Kinsella will “man up” and sue me for calling him a liar over and over. He never does. I wait to own his house in vain.
Oh, and for those of you who might not quite get the liar Kinsella’s “bigot” reference. Here’s the part of the 2004 post the sad twat is still obsessing over:
Over at the Blogs Canada Politics E-Group I have been suggesting that I am not willing to give Muslims the benefit of the doubt unless and until I hear Muslim organizations and clerics condemn this sort of bestial killing. This, apparently, makes me a bigot.
The comment was in response to the Muslim silence on the cheering topic of beheadings.
My advice to EMG - and anyone else - is to simply stop reading the horrid little shit. You’ll miss nothing, not even oppo research as the liar Warren Kinsella no longer has a pot to piss in in the Liberal or any other party and you will not have to shower quite so often.
The YouGov poll indicates that the Conservatives go into the new year with a 12-point lead over Labour.
Gordon Brown: Poll puts Tories 12 points ahead of Labour
Women and manual workers are deserting Brown’s Labour in droves
In an election, the poll result would lead to David Cameron winning a “workable majority” in the Commons.
The findings - which follow the Northern Rock crisis and the lost child benefits record scandal - underlines the reversal in Mr Brown’s fortunes and the loss of public faith in him as Prime Minister.
Sixty per cent of people are now “dissatisfied” with Mr Brown as Prime Minister compared to 27 per cent in July and 48 per cent in October. Only 24 per cent of those polled say they are “satisfied” with the job he has done during his first six months in office.
Overall, 14 per cent rate his performance as “very good or good” but 51 per cent say he has been “poor or very poor”. telegraph
Normally I would be thrilled to see a Conservative Party trouncing a lefty bunch; but David Cameron is so wet he squishes. He’s not fit to carry Lady Thatcher’s handbag and is, realistically, the ugly face of New Tories. I’ve no time for Brown and none for the Social-Democrat-Liberals; but there is no actual Conservative Party in England and that is rather sad.
Dr Rowan Williams has claimed there was little evidence that the Magi even existed and there was certainly nothing to prove there were three of them or that they were kings.
Archbishop says nativity ‘a legend’
Dr Williams argued that the traditional Christmas story was nothing but a ‘legend’
He said the only reference to the wise men from the East was in Matthew’s gospel and the details were very vague.
Dr Williams said: “Matthew’s gospel says they are astrologers, wise men, priests from somewhere outside the Roman Empire, that’s all we’re really told. It works quite well as legend.”
The Archbishop went on to dispel other details of the Christmas story, adding that there were probably no asses or oxen in the stable.
He argued that Christmas cards which showed the Virgin Mary cradling the baby Jesus, flanked by shepherds and wise men, were misleading. As for the scenes that depicted snow falling in Bethlehem, the Archbishop said the chance of this was “very unlikely”.
In a final blow to the traditional nativity story, Dr Williams concluded that Jesus was probably not born in December at all. He said: “Christmas was when it was because it fitted well with the winter festival.” daily telegraph
Even a social Anglican like me has to wonder at the dimness of the man who leads my Church.
Religion is about stories. And great stories are about the heart of the matter. The historic Jesus is a highly problematic figure. “On the record” he barely exists at all. His birth, which we are about to celebrate, may very well have occurred in June and there is every possibility that he did not actually walk on water, feed the multitudes or cure lepers. Hello, Rowan, this does not matter.
If I really wanted a history seminar I would take a history seminar and not Communion.
It is, Rowan, fairly common knowledge that the Queen’s birthday is not May 24 or there abouts. Queen Elizabeth was both on April 21, 1926. Oddly that does not and should not matter.
In a much more basic way, the exact date of Jesus’ birth, what animals were in attendance, and even the location are interesting and entirely unimportant factoids of history. Far be it from me to remind the Archbishop of the true meaning of Christmas however,
USA: Dr. David Wojick is a UN IPCC expert reviewer, who earned his PhD in Philosophy of Science and co-founded the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie-Mellon University: “In point of fact, the hypothesis that solar variability and not human activity is warming the oceans goes a long way to explain the puzzling idea that the Earth’s surface may be warming while the atmosphere is not. The GHG (greenhouse gas) hypothesis does not do this.” Wojick added: “The public is not well served by this constant drumbeat of false alarms fed by computer models manipulated by advocates.”
New Zealand: IPCC reviewer and climate researcher Dr. Vincent Gray, an expert reviewer on every single draft of the IPCC reports going back to 1990 and author of The Greenhouse Delusion: A Critique of “Climate Change 2001: “The [IPCC] ‘Summary for Policymakers’ might get a few readers, but the main purpose of the report is to provide a spurious scientific backup for the absurd claims of the worldwide environmentalist lobby that it has been established scientifically that increases in carbon dioxide are harmful to the climate. It just does not matter that this ain’t so.”
Germany: Paleoclimate expert Augusto Mangini of the University of Heidelberg in Germany, criticized the UN IPCC summary. “I consider the part of the IPCC report, which I can really judge as an expert, i.e. the reconstruction of the paleoclimate, wrong,” Mangini noted in an April 5, 2007 article. He added: “The earth will not die.”
What is missing from all of this are politicians brave enough to stand up and say that the science is simply wrong, or, at best, too uncertain to lead to any policy in particular or justify any expenditure of public funds.
AGW fatigue has certainly begun to dull the religious fervor of the middle class which is to say I am still seeing lots of Christmas lights being strung, cars driven and new stuff being bought. However, that is not really going to stop the madness.
What might stop it would be coming up with ways of forcing the various governments to defend their actions in the Courts where, well, evidence is required. The problem there being to find a government action which is, in fact, subject to legal challenge. There is no right to be told the truth nor any requirement that government prove the scientific basis for its actions.
Living here in Victoria, a hotbed of fuzzy green AGW hysteria, about the only thing I can think of doing to counter AGM is to write for the local rags…not that I expect non-consensus articles have much chance of being printed; but that is another story.
Strictly speaking, mat is a language built upon only five (5) extremely vulgar roots. Using the rules of Russian grammar and word formation, verbs, adjectives, and nouns of every kind can be formed—entire sentences (and diatribes) composed exclusively of mat vocabulary. Days to learn, a lifetime to master. russian cursing.com
Jonathan Raban, in Passage to Juneau, recounts, and I paraphrase, overhearing a conversation in which every second word was “trucking” as in “I drove the trucking fuck in the trucking woods, Truck, I was trucking trucked”.
What fun to have five extremely vulgar words. And vodka.
Sure, there have been women Prime Ministers: Golda Meir, Indira Ghandi and the fabulous Mrs. Thatcher. But it would be pretty much impossible to, notwithstanding Amis pere’s weird interest in Mrs. T, say these were, well, babes…or even milfs.
Ms. Tymoshenko, along with her solid democratic credentials and sheer Ukrainian patriotism, is hot.
I finally have the comments back to working....sort of. Basically I have to wade through the spam to find the nuggets. I do this a couple of times a day. Sometimes comments are lost. I am working on this. What I need is a Capcha like the coolkids have.
