the blog quebecois

Terry Glavin:

Odd as it sounds, there is no House of Commons rule that prohibits MPs from moonlighting like this. Odder still, Trudeau has got away with justifying this lucrative sideline work on the grounds that he’s doing it as a favour to his constituents. “It is to make sure that the values of the people who elected me in Papineau are being heard in Ottawa and across the country,” he told reporters.

This is like something the notoriously stupid Alaskan ex-governor Sarah Palin might have said, but it gets a pass when Trudeau says it, and Trudeau gets away with this sort of thing all the time owing only to a pathetic and distinctly Canadian variety of celebrity worship.

Kind of a lazy trope -- Sarah Palin is dumb -- from Glavin, a writer whom I otherwise admire. Why, precisely, is Palin "notoriously stupid"? Because she doesn't read the New York Times? She and about 299,500,000 other Americans, last I counted.

I've never heard her say anything as dopey as, say, Barack Obama does pretty well every time he fires up the teleprompter. (And you don't want to hear him try to wing it.)

Besides, she's not even actively in politics these days. If he wants a more relevant female target, how about California's Axis of Moron: Barbara Boxer; Dianne Feinstein; Nancy Pelosi. Talk about your target-rich environments.

Canada.com

The United States thinks the United Nations has a drinking problem.

Ambassador Joseph M. Torsella, who represents the U.S. on the U.N.'s budget committee, said Monday that the tense process of negotiating the world body's annual budget is made more complicated by the number of diplomats who turn up drunk.

The U.N. budget is finalized in December, when holiday parties apparently lead to some revelry spilling over into budget negotiations.

The U.S. is making "the modest proposal that the negotiating rooms should in future be an inebriation-free zone," Torsella said during a private meeting of the budget committee. The U.S. mission released a transcript of his remarks.

Some tipsy negotiating partners have left the U.S. "truly grateful for the strategic opportunities," he said.

But Torsella said the committee should "save the champagne for toasting the successful end of the session."

La Vie Sexuelle des Jeux Vidéo

A funny piece showing the sex antics of video game characters. There are a few brief glimpses of flesh, but nothing too NSFW.

Via Blazing Cat Fur

Toronto Sun:

RIYADH - Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the Islamist movement’s most active branch, has released an English-language magazine advising would-be militants on how to torch parked cars and cause traffic accidents.

The magazine, released on militant websites, also warns France to pull back from Mali and lists 11 public figures in the West, including author Salman Rushdie, who it says are “wanted dead or alive for crimes against Islam”.

AQAP, based in the impoverished, lawless state of Yemen, has previously plotted to bring down international airliners and is seen by Western governments as a danger to oil-producing Gulf states and major crude shipment routes.

In a section entitled “open source jihad”, the magazine gives tips on how to set fire to parked cars, including advice such as “don’t get petrol on yourself”, and suggests spilling oil on road bends to cause crashes.

Good God, could these people possibly get more pathetic?

Let's just pray they don't ever hear about the old flaming bag of dog poop on the doorstep. That alone could destroy Western civilization, or at least the kuffar's new Hush Puppies.

Cracked:

On the island of Malta is a prehistoric underground megalithic structure known awesomely as the Hypogeum of Hal-Saflieni, which sounds like the title of Terry Gilliam's next movie. It was discovered by accident in 1902 when some workers were digging a hole and broke through the ceiling. Oh, and they also found about 7,000 skeletons all clustered near the entrance. So, that's creepy.

Since most humans inherently lack common sense, the workers decided to take a look around, instead of fleeing from whatever it was that 7,000 people clearly died trying to escape. Luckily, rather than having their faces melted off by some Indiana Jones MacGuffin, they found something truly astonishing.

Mark Steyn:

The author Hedegaard is one of the few Danes who is a certified racist, as he some years ago was fined by a High Court for having stated in a blog interview that Muslim fathers rape their children. He was later acquitted by the Supreme Court.

That last sentence negates the ones above. There is no conviction for "racism": Both it and the fine were quashed, reversed, overturned, kicked into the garbage can by the supreme court. The prosecution was outrageous, and some sense of what Denmark's most eminent jurists made of it can be deduced from their decision to revoke his conviction 7–0. What sort of reporter writes that "the author Hedegaard is one of the few Danes who is a certified racist" ("papper på att han var rasist")? Even in an ever more absurdly over-credentialed world, the Danish state is not yet handing out certificates for racism. Whatever a "certified racist" is, Lars remains, as far as the Danish legal system is concerned, fully uncertified.

I have read the "papper på att han var rasist" line in a couple of dozen Swedish media outlets now without being able to find a name appended to the piece: It's just an un-bylined wire story that appeared everywhere. But I wonder about the furtive anonymous man who wrote it, and the agency managers who sent it out to their clients, and the editors who read it through and printed it unchanged. I would wager that all of them are considerably younger than Lars, and so marinated in the state ideology that they can barely comprehend that free societies should not have a state ideology. And so what matters to them about this story is not that in liberal, progressive Scandinavia writers are threatened with death but that writers should not be holding these opinions in the first place.

If this is how it goes when Sweden's Muslim population is 5 percent, what will it be like when it's 10 or 15? "You can't live your life that way," Lars told Douglas Murray in The Spectator. "If every time you sit down to your computer to write something you have this idea in the back of your head, 'I may be killed if I write this,' then of course you won't be as good as you could be. You've got to distance yourself from fear if you want to be a true writer."

Last year at the European Parliament, I had the honor of presenting Lars with a "Defender of Freedom" award, and noted that journalists congratulate themselves on their "courage" endlessly, far more often than soldiers or firemen do. But on the rare occasions they're actually called upon to show any, they shrink and shrivel: "All your liberal friends who went to the PEN dinners and bored the pants off you with that bit of apocryphal Voltaire — 'I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it' — all fall utterly silent. C'mon, nobody's asking you to defend anyone to the death. A mildly principled tweet would do. A tepidly supportive fax."

But no. Too much to ask.

As I said, Lars is 70. But I would rather have him fighting my corner than the young, self-neutered eunuch-men of a cowed media, watching the lights go out on free speech and slipping easily and painlessly into the accomplices of thuggery.

Neatorama:

"I got to tackle the official "#1 worst portrait tattoo in the world" today. I'm sure you've all seen it a million times online, as had I. I couldn't believe my eyes when this guy walked in and showed me this project. I think my jaw literally hit the floor. He went on to tell me the story behind the portrait; He had just married his beautiful wife and not even a month afterwards she was killed in a horrible house fire accident leaving him to raise their child alone. Shortly after he went to a local tattoo studio to memorialize his wife and was left with this abomination. He later returned to that studio for one more session, thinking that perhaps "he had done something wrong in the healing of the tattoo" and they butchered it even more the second time. Finally, he drove all the way to my studio, Empire Ink, just to meet me and to see what his options were. Touched by his story, I gifted the entire project to him for free. Now he has closure and I have an amazing story to add to my portfolio!"

CNSNews:

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) wants its white VISTA volunteers who work with low-income, racially diverse public schools to examine the “privilege” their Caucasian race confers on them.

DPI devotes an entire Web page to “Power and Privilege,” including links to racial justice workshops and online tests where VISTA volunteers can “learn about your personal bias.”

One “diversity” document linked to DPI’s Web site suggests that white people “wear a white wristband as a reminder about your privilege, and as a personal commitment to explain why you wear the wristband.”

Sorry, my well-honed sense of "white privilege" absolutely forbids me from volunteering to help out the inferior races. But tell you what, I'll send one of my small brown maids over to see what she can do. Pip Pip!

The Daily Beast:

The British broadsheets called it “the most coveted secretarial job in the world.”

In 1962 a mild-mannered Liverpudlian gal by the name of Freda Kelly was chosen by manager Brian Epstein to serve as the Beatles’ secretary. She also ran the Fab Four’s fan club, sending their rabid devotees authentic gifts from the lads—ranging from signed photos to locks of George Harrison’s hair—thereby serving as arbiter of Beatlemania.

International Business Daily:

House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., infuriated Canadian conservatives this week by alleging that Canadians do not want the Keystone XL pipeline to be constructed -- a statement she reportedly made while raising doubts about the true value of the controversial oil pipeline.

Well, Nancy, you know what they say -- sometimes you have to build the pipe to find out what's in it.

Paul Anka:

And he [Frank Sinatra] had strong dislikes, such as an irrational loathing of Barbra Streisand and the singer Johnny Mathis.

Well, I don't know about Johnny Mathis; but it's well recognized that an"irrational loathing" of Babs is the first sign on the long road to recovery.

Frank Sinatra: bon vivant; impeccable jazz stylist; a flawed human being, but striving for perfection.

CBC:

A group of young people from the James Bay Cree community of Whapmagoostui, Que., has arrived at Parliament Hill in Ottawa, ending a 1,600-kilometre trek meant to bring attention to aboriginal issues.

Six youths and a guide left Whapmagoostui in January to snowshoe and walk to Ottawa in support of the Idle No More movement. They called the trek "The Journey of Nishiyuu," which means "The Journey of the People" in Cree.

The group now numbers nearly 400, according to volunteers and Gatineau police, after other children and youth from Cree and Algonquin communities joined them along the way. Thousands of people joined them on Monday afternoon at Parliament Hill as their journey came to an end.

Ah, it brings up the ancient traditions, when young men, as their fathers and grandfathers before them, would band up to venture into the trackless void, there to seek the wisdom of their gods, to commune with nature, on a spiritual quest through the endless wilderness until they finally arrive at the sacred place known as Ot-ta-wa; where rumor has it, the Great White Mother will grant them all sorts of wampum, or at least busfare back home. Kind of brings a lump to your throat.

Real tough guys don't need guns, they just need a positive, can-do attitude

Some gentle soul has taken on the task of airbrushing out guns from movie stills, replacing them with the universal gesture that signals "OK!"*

*Except where it means "Up yours!"

Mark Steyn:

By contrast, consider Bilal Philips, a Toronto boy who "reverted" to Islam in 1972 and was the keynote speaker at last year's big shindig at the Muslim Council of Calgary. He doesn't want the sodomites expelled from school life, merely from life in general: He believes that every homosexual should face the "punishment for deviant behavior . . . which is death." But don't get the wrong idea: "The media tends to take my words out of context," he said, explaining that he only favors the execution of all male homosexuals in Muslim countries, which Alberta is not, yet. So the head of the Calgary Police Diversity Unit, Bill Dodd, and various other panjandrums of Canadian officialdom were happy to attend the conference with Mr. Philips, because, after all, you can't get more diverse than a multiculti squish sitting side by side with a bloke who wants to behead every gay in town. The mayor of Calgary, an Ismaili Muslim called Naheed Nenshi, was less enthusiastic about Mr. Philips, but says he has "the right to say his piece."

Exactly. In Canada, the law denies "the right to say his piece" to the likes of Bill Whatcott, a man who believes that homosexuals are sinners and in need of God's grace and forgiveness, but it has no objection to those who think homosexuals are evil and should be put to death. Mr. Philips need never fear the scrutiny of the "human rights" commission, or the cost of ten-year legal battles.

No homosexual needs the state's protection from Bill Whatcott. But all of us need protection from nitwit jurists blithely sacrificing core Western liberties to ideological compliance. It's not about Left vs. Right, gay vs. straight, religious vs. secular; it's about free vs. unfree. And on that most profound question, Canada's supreme court is on the wrong side. Nuts to them.

New York Times

After a high-profile flirtation with a Senate race, the actress Ashley Judd announced Wednesday that she would not seek the Democratic nomination in 2014 from Kentucky.

“I realize that my responsibilities and energy at this time need to be focused on my family,” Ms. Judd wrote to her 171,000 followers in a Twitter message on Wednesday afternoon. “Regretfully, I am currently unable to consider a campaign for the Senate.”

Ms. Judd’s interest in the seat, held by Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, drew national attention, a foretaste of the media barrage that one of her champions, Representative John Yarmuth, Democrat of Kentucky, predicted if she took the plunge. Mr. Yarmuth and others hoped it would unleash a gusher of campaign donations from across the country.

But Ms. Judd, 44, who campaigned last year for President Obama, was also the target of fierce pre-emptive attacks by Republicans. Some Democratic strategists in Kentucky also expressed worries that her liberal views would be too unpopular in a state Mr. Obama lost by 23 percentage points in November. The strategists fretted that a loss by Ms. Judd to Mr. McConnell, a five-term senator, would drag down other Democrats on the state ballot and threaten the party’s control of the Kentucky House of Representatives.

Ms. Judd, who spent part of her youth in Ashland, Ky., but now lives in Tennessee, was mocked by Republicans, including the strategist Karl Rove, as a carpetbagger and “radical Hollywood liberal.”

This is terrible news. I first heard of Judd in 2006. I had never seen her, but just assumed she was one of the singing Judds who they kept locked in the attic because she couldn't, um, sing. I've since found out that she is, horrors, an actress.

Now, I've always considered singers to be somewhat neurotic and flighty. But no one, no one brings the inner moron to the fight like an actress. Why, it's rumored that Sean Penn's pet name for her is "The Big Stupid." And he should know.

I'm not sure of the entire backstory on this, but Josh Trevino, who used to blog under the name Tactius, was dragooned into squiring Miss (I just give her that honorific because I know it'd drive her nuts. Well, more nuts.) Judd around on a charity tour of South Africa. Trevino's blog is now defunct, but somebody copied the piece to the Free Republic, and you can read it here . (Someone's browser somewhere along the line introduced some formatting errors -- quotation marks appear as an accented "Ó" so it looks a bit messy, but it's still decipherable.)

Read it and weep, Kentuckians. You could have had her instead of boring old Mitch McConnell. I'm not so sure she would have been an improvement; but vastly more amusing at the least.