the blog quebecois

From ifeminists.net:

When Hillary Clinton says it takes a "village" to raise a child, does this mean that snooping, nosey, prying and gossipy people will be surrounding all of us -- snoopers who are employees of the state with the power of police?

This woman wonders. I was forced by DSS to attend a "support group" for abused women, against my will. Or else I would never see my daughter again. That is what they told me. I was required to report every week to the Independence House, Hyannis, although it's supposedly for women who seek their help. It's run primarily by volunteers who are not counselors, therapists, or psychologists. They are all former battered women. Yet my DSS "service plan" stated that I had to attend for "treatment."

I've fortunately never had any run-ins with the -- frankly, creepy -- people who inhabit the social service bureaucracies, but I've heard enough horror stories that I believe every word of this woman's tale. Orwell and Kafka foretold it to those who would listen.

But, as they say, read the whole thing here.

LONDON, England (Reuters) -- The Three Wise Men who followed the star to Bethlehem bearing gifts for the baby Jesus may not have been all that wise -- or even men.

The traditional infant nativity play scene could be in for a drastic rewrite after the Church of England indulged in some academic gender-swapping over the three Magi at its General Synod in London this week.

A committee revising the latest prayer book said the term "Magi" was a transliteration of the name used by officials at the Persian court, and that they could well have been women.

"Magi is a word which discloses nothing about numbers, wisdom or gender embodied in the term," a Synod spokesman said on Tuesday after the revision was agreed by the Church of England's parliament which meets twice a year.

[ . . .]

The revision committee said: "While it seems very unlikely that these Persian court officials were female, the possibility that one or more of the Magi were female cannot be excluded completely."

There is no theological dispute about the gifts they brought -- gold, frankincense and myrrh -- but the prayer has been changed to use the word Magi on the grounds that "the visitors were not necessarily wise and not necessarily men."

Synod officials denied that the Church of England, a pillar of the Establishment in Britain, was being seized by an attack of political correctness and pandering to feminists.

Ah, good point. Replacing the Three Wise Men with the Three Stupid Women certainly isn't pandering to feminists. The only question is how long it'll take for the feminists to figure this out and say

"Heyyyyy!?!?"

I always like to start off Mondays with a bit of cheery news, so here we go:

VANCOUVER -- Canada's most influential lobby group for women's rights has been so crippled by debt and abandoned by women across the country that it's now too broke to answer the phone. Sources tell CP the 30-year-old National Action Committee on the Status of Women is begging the federal government to forgive unpaid taxes.

Why didn't I think of that?

Via Tongue Tied:

A devoted chess player named Bill Ware believe chess as it is currently played is racist and wants to change the rules to eliminate it, according to the Southern Digest, the student newspaper at Southern University in Baton Rouge, La.

Ware says the fact that white moves first and black is forced to play defense "states that white is better than black" and represents a form of racism.

His solution is Algebra Chess, in which the white and black pieces are replaced by pieces of different colors and the determining factor on who moves first depends on what square the queen sits on.

I gather this "devoted chess player" is unacquainted with the numerous Black counter-gambits that can be played to neutralize White's slight tempo advantage.

And what this has to do with "algebra" is beyond me. By the way, Mr. Racial Sensitivity, didn't you know that "algebra" is . . . sexist? (Huh-huh, he said "bra.")

How did that go again? Ah, yes, it's all coming back to me now.

It may seem to innocent readers, if any such remain, that we are putting words in the authors' mouths; but no: they disapprove of a particular problem in which a girl and her boyfriend run toward each other (even though the girl's slower speed is carefully explained by the fact that she is carrying luggage) because it portrays a heterosexual involvement. They object to a problem about a contractor and the contractor's workers (sex undeclared), because they assume that the student will envision the workers as male. On the other hand, they offer for our approval a problem about Sue and Debbie, "a couple financing their $70,000 home."" Their general maxims call for problems "presenting female heroes and breaking gender stereotypes" and "analyzing sex similarities and differences intentionally" and "affirming women's experiences." All this, mind, is to be done in an algebra class.

the balance is precarious as anyone can tell
this world’s going to hell
don’t allow this mythologic hopeful monster to exact its price

-- bad religion

Via the CBC:

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) - Severe weather caused by global warming can pose greater physical danger to women than men, a Canadian attending a UN conference on climate change said Friday.

"For instance, often women don't know how to swim, so in a flood situation that can lead to a higher instance of death or injury," Angie Daze, a program manager with a Canadian group called Reducing Vulnerability to Climate Change, said.

Oh, for crying out loud. Learn to swim or knit yourself a rowboat or something while you're waiting.

Via Tim Blair

Ace and his readers are perplexed as to why a piece of valueless dreck like The Vagina Monologues is not only allowed onto college campuses across the nation with nary a bleat of protest from the administrations of those universities but is also welcomed with hosannas, and widely publicized as a shining example of "academic freedom" or some such nonsense, but a spoof of the same travelling menstrual show is immediately clamped down on and hustled off the first campus on which it appeared. Academic freedom for one and for all? Not if it's the freedom to make fun of girls.

Busy tonight. You could do worse than read peripatetic blogger/webmistress Andrea Harris' withering takedown of The Vagina Monologues.

Following the school shooting in Montreal, the gun-control lobby is gleeful that their stupid, expensive, unworkable long-gun registry might be saved.

Ian Robinson reminds us of one central driving factor behind it:

The entire gun control and registry debate in this country is, and always has been, based on an individual case, that of the slaughter of 14 female students at Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique in 1989 by another loser with a grudge.

And it has been a debate that has demonstrated a barely concealed hostility toward men in general and male firearms owners in particular.

In Canada, gun control wasn't a public policy issue, it became -- thanks to the 1989 massacre with a male perpetrator and female victims -- part of the nation's ongoing gender wars and was framed in precisely those terms.

Thanks largely to Wendy Cukier, the glamour-puss at left. Cukier at the time was described as a professor of "Human Ecology," at least according to my memory. (Her present c.v. doesn't mention it -- she's now in "Information Technology," or at least the aspects of it that impinge on, especially, "gender.") I have no idea what "Human Ecology" is, but I think it's what sociologists claimed to be experts on when "Sociology" became an official term of ridicule.

At any rate, I was listening to an open-line radio interview with her when a caller phoned in and asked what qualified her as an expert on guns.

In full dudgeon, she said, and I repeat in full:

"I. Am. A. Professor."

Well! That settles it.

I suppose I once would have once been impressed by that. When I was twelve years old, maybe.

If the Boomers taught us nothing else, at least they taught us to distrust Authority.

Saskatoon StarPhoenix:

Despite a growing gender gap on Canadian campuses, universities are balking at a fledgling movement in the United States to make special efforts to attract more men, such as adopting affirmative action initiatives that favour male applicants over female ones.

Campus recruiters and admissions managers from Memorial University of Newfoundland to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver say they are taking no extra steps to target male students.

Nor do they consider it a problem -- at least not yet -- that female university students outnumber men by about 60-40 on average nationwide.

If the situation were reversed -- men had a 20% numerical advantage in seats -- you'd better believe it would be a "problem." The feministas would be howling from the rooftops that this constituted "systemic" discrimination.

It doesn't at all surprise me that institutions that display an almost pathological hostility (for examples too numerous to go into here, check out Christina Hoff Summers' The War Against Boys) towards boys and young men would wind up with such screwed-up demographics.

Since the only numbers that these bean-counters seem to understand are simple percentages and government dollars, the solution is evident: Until the universities can show good-faith efforts to recruit males until they achieve a more equitable balance, funding should be chopped to reflect the disparity. If they really need the money, I'm sure they can find it by shutting down some of the innumerable basket-weaving courses that infest critical faculties like Women's Studies.

Barbie was right: Math is hard! But arithmetic is easy.