the blog quebecois

It's as if he were made of stone.

Pathetic.

Rush Limbaugh apologized for calling Sandra Fluke a "prostitute" and a "slut" during his radio show last week. Kirsten Powers contrasts the uproar with the treatment of lefties like Bill Maher:

Maher has called Palin a “dumb twat” and dropped the C-word in describing the former Alaska governor. He called Palin and Congresswoman Bachmann “boobs” and “two bimbos.” He said of the former vice-presidential candidate, “She is not a mean girl. She is a crazy girl with mean ideas.” He recently made a joke about Rick Santorum’s wife using a vibrator. Imagine now the same joke during the 2008 primary with Michelle Obama’s name in it, and tell me that he would still have a job. Maher said of a woman who was harassed while breast-feeding at an Applebee’s, “Don't show me your tits!” as though a woman feeding her child is trying to flash Maher. (Here’s a way to solve his problem: don’t stare at a strangers’ breasts). Then, his coup de grâce: “And by the way, there is a place where breasts and food do go together. It’s called Hooters!”

Meanwhile, Limbaugh is partially vindicated as people take a closer look at Fluke. She might not be a prostitute, but she certainly seems to be obsessed with the bizarre fringes of sexual identity:

Sandra Fluke is being sold by the left as something she's not. Namely a random co-ed from Georgetown law who found herself mixed up in the latest front of the culture war who was simply looking to make sure needy women had access to birth control. That, of course, is not the case.

As many have already uncovered Sandra Fluke she is, in reality, a 30 year old long time liberal activist who enrolled at Georgetown with the express purpose of fighting for the school to pay for students' birth control. She has been pushing for mandated coverage of contraceptives at Georgetown for at least three years according to the Washington Post.

However, as I discovered today, birth control is not all that Ms. Fluke believes private health insurance must cover. She also, apparently, believes that it is discrimination deserving of legal action if "gender reassignment" surgeries are not covered by employer provided health insurance. She makes these views clear in an article she co-edited with Karen Hu in the Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law.

Matthew Yglesias:

As some of you are probably aware, I tweeted something rather rude upon learning the news of Andrew Breitbart's death. Consequently, many of his many fans are unhappy with me. Fair enough. In consequence of that, many of them have decided to spam the Amazon page for The Rent Is Too Damn High with highly negative reviews that typically reveal that the reviewer has not even made a passing acquaintance with my views.

He posted this whiny screed at Slate. And yes, egged on by various bloggers like Ace of Spades, people are posting "reviews" of his Kindle ebook. I have no idea if it's any good -- I rather doubt it, judging by what I've seen of his blog. On the other hand, I'd gladly pay money for those reviews. They're hilarious. Here's my favorite:

I wasn’t expecting 20 pages filled with naked pictures of the author in various poses. I found the photos that included animals to be in extremely poor taste.

Many more here.

The Register:

With the help of two graduate students, Halderman started to examine the software. Despite it being a relatively clean Ruby on Rails build, they spotted a shell injection vulnerability within a few hours. They figured out a way of writing output to the images directory on the compromised server, and of encrypting traffic so that the front-end intrusion detection system couldn't spot them. The team also managed to guess the login details for the terminal server used by the voting system. This wasn't exactly difficult, since the user name and password were both "admin".

The dreaded digital prostate exam last week. Believe me, it's not as romantic as it sounds. A little bit of mood music and champagne would go a long way. Just sayin', doctor.

The good news is that I have one, and it seems to be intact. (Passed the PSA test, too, so it wasn't a surprise.)

Speaking of anatomical topics, DAZ 3D, one of the most popular makers of 3d graphics software, is releasing three of their most powerful programs for free until the end of March. (That'd 3d as in the sense that the things you pose or create inhabit a world with height, depth and width. You don't need special glasses to view the final images.) They include DAZ Studio Pro, the main modelling program; Bryce, for designing backgrounds, natural and man-built; and Hexagon, for creating 3d objects. They're available in Macintosh and for Windows 64-bit and 32-bit varieties. The 32-bit would probably run under Vista or even XP. (The main program works fine on my $500 laptop, though I think I'd go crazy trying to use a trackpad for any length with it -- you'll want a trackball or mouse.)

Download them here . Even if your present equipment won't run it, it would be a great idea to download the programs for later. Altogether, it's a +$800 value. If you are talented at design, you can even make some money at it -- there are many sites that will host your work for free (or for a small fee) and collect payments for you, etc.

They're also offering other stuff for free, including the Victoria (pictured) and Michael 4 models. To get them go here and sort by lowest price first. The free items will be listed as $0.00. Victoria's on the first page; Michael's on the second. You'll also find interesting things like Mixamo software, which you can use to animate your creations.

This leads us to another discovery -- click here to view part of the main design screen for Studio Pro. That's one of the generic models that come with the program. Notice anything?

That's right. There's no "There" "Down There." Or to use more scientific terms, no "va-jay-jay" nor "winkie" to be found. Fortunately (or unfortunately, as the case may be), the Internet Sex Fiends (motto: Sex! Sex! Sexsexsex!!!) have rushed to correct this oversight by lovingly crafting both male and female, fully-functional (so to speak) Naughty Bits. Worse, they then cast their characters into ghastly tableaux illustrating the perverse, insatiable appetites of Internet Sex Fiends. That's why they're called Internet Sex Fiends.

Or so I have heard.

I wouldn't have a clue where to find this stuff, of course. There is a rumor, however, that a search for "daz genitals" might turn up some interesting links (or possibly a movie about a German submarine in WWII).

“I really don’t think my tuna casserole is that bad. It’s better than my friend Debbie’s - her cooking is like abortions.”

Edmonton Journal:

Thirteen per cent of survey respondents said domestic violence is not as serious if it results from people getting so angry they temporarily lose control. And eight per cent did not agree that it's never acceptable to physically assault a woman if she did something to incite the anger.

Reimer said the information gleaned from the survey will be useful to those who work in the field of domestic violence response and prevention, helping them to target their message and design programs.

"This is where we're at," Reimer said. "We've got a realistic appraisal here, so now let's take what we know and see how we can make a difference to make things better."

Guest panellists at Monday's event included Enbridge president and CEO Pat Daniel, Calgary police Chief Rick Hanson, White Ribbon Campaign program director Humberto Carolo, activist and former NHLer Sheldon Kennedy, and Alberta Premier Alison Redford, who said some of the survey results "made me sick to my stomach."

Redford said one of the statistics that stood out for her was the fact that 21 per cent of men surveyed said slapping a child's face is acceptable behaviour.

Odd that the same questions weren't asked of women. I wouldn't be at all surprised if those numbers were doubled. Maybe the fates of people who dared to question feminist orthodoxy tends to dampen the spirit of honest inquiry, as detailed by Carey Roberts.

The Atlantic:

It's been suggested that, given the seriousness of climate change, we ought to adopt something like China's one child policy. There was a group of doctors in Britain who recently advocated a two-child maximum. But at the end of the day those are crude prescriptions---what we really care about is some kind of fixed allocation of greenhouse gas emissions per family. If that's the case, given certain fixed allocations of greenhouse gas emissions, human engineering could give families the choice between two medium sized children, or three small sized children. From our perspective that would be more liberty enhancing than a policy that says "you can only have one or two children." A family might want a really good basketball player, and so they could use human engineering to have one really large child.

'Some ideas are so stupid only an intellectual could believe them.'— George Orwell

Wonder how long until they're torturing people in the basement of Toronto Police Headquarters? I give it ten years.

Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks. The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.

And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.
The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars

And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

--------------------------------------------------------
Dylan Thomas “The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower" (1933).

Got wood?

It felt like someone had thrown a lit match in there. I began hopping around and breathing in the rapid, short puffs I'd learned in birth classes, so long ago, before I realized I didn't need to breathe like that if I took the epidural.

I could really use a frikkin epidural right now.

The burning didn't let up. How long was I supposed to leave it there?!

I waited. And waited. If this was supposed to get me in the mood, it wasn't working. It did get me lying down though, because both standing and sitting proved to be excruciating.

Gradually I felt... what? A small buzz? Certainly a definite, if slight, lightheadedness. Maybe it was the onset of toxic shock syndrome. Or intoxicated shock syndrome...?

I normally don't link to the Huffington Post, but I'll have to make an exception for Danielle Crittenden's brave experiment.

It's science, dammit!

Listening to the radio, I heard the story behind rocker David Lee Roth’s notorious insistence that Van Halen’s contracts with concert promoters contain a clause specifying that a bowl of M&M’s has to be provided backstage, but with every single brown candy removed, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation to the band. And at least once, Van Halen followed through, peremptorily cancelling a show in Colorado when Roth found some brown M&M’s in his dressing room. This turned out to be, however, not another example of the insane demands of power-mad celebrities but an ingenious ruse.

As Roth explained in his memoir, Crazy from the Heat, “Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third level markets.

We’d pull up with nine 18-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors — whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through. The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function. So just as a little test, buried somewhere in the middle of the rider, would be article 126, the no-brown-M&M’s clause. “When I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl,” he wrote, “well, we’d line-check the entire production.

Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error… Guaranteed you’d run into a problem.” These weren’t trifles, the radio story pointed out. The mistakes could be lifethreatening. In Colorado, the band found the local promoters had failed to read the weight requirements and the staging would have fallen through the arena.

I was never much of a Van Halen fan, but that looks like an interesting read (probably not, however, for the $312.60 that Amazon lists it at).

Via Five Feet of Fury

Breitbart.com:

France's interior minister says a gunman suspected in a wave of killings has stopped talking to police, and that authorities have been monitoring him for years.

Claude Gueant was speaking Wednesday in the southern city of Toulouse, where a police raid is under way targeting the gunman. He is suspected in three shootings that killed three Jewish schoolchildren, a rabbi and three paratroopers in recent days.

The man has thrown his handgun out a window but has other weapons on him, including an AK-47 assault rifle, and has used them in volleys with police surrounding the building in this southwestern city, Gueant said.

Time to let the paratroopers have a crack at him. They can always use the practice in Combat in Built-Up Areas; and as a bonus, they can drill the dickweed jihadi with enough lead that they'll have to use a crane to lift him out and bury him in a hazardous-waste site.

Toronto Sun:

Who is Craig Scott? His website describes him as having “done substantial work on the Afghan detainee (Taliban) issue” that has obsessed the NDP since 2006, when the party first raised the issue of mistreatment of Taliban prisoners.

While Canadian troops were dying fighting the Taliban, the NDP’s then-defence critic, Dawn Black, was asking the Conservatives to ensure the Taliban caught while committing war crimes were not mistreated.

On the eve of the May, 2011 election, the baton was picked up by Scott, who wrote an op-ed asking voters to defeat the Conservatives because, according to him “… Canada’s government has deliberately maintained a policy of transferring detainees in Afghanistan to Afghan intelligence services in full knowledge of the torture practices of those agencies and thus of the risks faced by each transferred detainee.”

Scott has not just stood up for the rights of our enemy, he has spoken up for some of the nastiest.

Word on the street is that he's really into hand-jobs. too. Getting them or giving, it's all good.

Aww. Look at that angelic face. What beast would harm this precious snowflake?

Well, probably no one. They might make an exception, however, for the rather more menacing version, found on Facebook, presumably auditioning for a spot with Thug Life.

(I thought that someone would surely have taken it down by now, which is why I screencapped it. But the link is still good.)

A bakery owner hires a young female clerk who likes to wear very short skirts and thong panties.

One day a young man enters the store, glances at the clerk and at the loaves of bread behind the counter. Noticing her short skirt and the location of the raisin bread, he has a brilliant idea. "I'd like some raisin bread please," the man says.

The clerk nods and climbs up a ladder to reach the raisin bread located on the very top shelf. The man standing almost directly beneath her, is provided with an excellent view, just as he thought. When she descends the ladder, he decides that he had better get two loaves, as he is "having company for dinner."

As the clerk retrieves the second loaf of bread, one of the other male customers notices what's going on and requests his own loaf of raisin bread.

After many trips, she is tired, irritated and begins to wonder, "Why the unusual interest in the raisin bread?"

Atop the ladder one more time, she looks down and glares at the men standing below. Then, she notices an elderly man standing amongst the crowd.

Thinking that she can save herself a trip, she yells at the elderly man, "Is it raisin for you too?"

OTTAWA, ON-- Newly elected NDP leader Thomas Mulcair cackled in insane glee today as he watched Peggy Nash’s suspended body dangle perilously above a tank of Amazonian piranhas at his secret mansion in the south of France.

“So Nash, you thought you could make an issue of my French citizenship, did you?” Mulcair chortled evilly while rubbing his long, bony hands together. “Well, it looks like you’re going to be a resident of France now too...a permanent one!”

Wow. I suspected that he had a nasty streak, but he's gone full-blown George Soros megavillain on us.

SARAH: I don’t get it.

DAD: That’s OK. Neither do most of my students.

Ooh, sounds even worse than Tar Sands, doesn't it?

Fear not, it's only my attempt at rebranding Thomas Mulcair by plugging his name into Wordsmith.org's Internet Anagram Server. I found these in the first thousand listed, but I really wasn't looking too hard:

Claim Sham Tour
Charisma Moult
Atlas Chromium
Macho Muralist
Samarium Cloth
A Clam Humorist
Charisma Lot Um
Racial Hums Tom
Casual Moth Rim
Aha Commit Slur
Marital Scum Oh
Sharia Cult Mom
Salami Chum Rot
Amoral Cum Shit
Imam Roach Lust
Imam Lotus Arch

There's another 62,000 of them, so there might be a real zinger buried in there if you'd care to go looking.